This computer was FREE in 1999 | eMachines eTower 533id 

i love how astolfo just follows you in every video

Astolfo is such a good co-host.

After a thunderstorm here in the UK, these machines would come in for repair in droves if they were connected to power without a surge protector, almost certainly PSU & mainboard would need replacing.

I had this same system when it came out except my GPU was an ATi 4MB Card. I eventually upgraded to a sound blaster in the pci slot. Played HL1, TFC (online), Quake III arena, Mechwarrior 3, Red Alert through dial-up... Calling my friend's houses to setup connection!

I am honestly amazed how much effort you throw into your videos with how little subscribers you have. I thoroughly enjoyed this video, don’t stop!

that bios layout from 1999 is IDENTICAL to my 2019 laptop bios💀💀😭

The never obsolete case would be crazy for a sleeper set up

I owned an eMachine and it was so weird I had to take it back. Not surprised they gave them away.

you seem to be the typical arch linux user (not meant as a bad thing) - the "i use arch btw" - the weard anime figure - tripple monitors

We had this when I was a kid haha😅

Man, I still need to get a drive and windows 98 for my old compaq

I think Crystall CS4280 can be configured by selecting Windows Sound System if available.

I absolutely love this case design. I’m not sure I can explain it. The stickers, the HDD activity LED, it just looks good. I know these aren’t really sought after, and for good reason but I like it.

He uses arch btw!

This with a pci fx 5200 or maybe a ati 9200 pci probably would do pretty well on a low budget at the time. I could see this being given to a kid just a year or two later as its replaced by a new family pc with the dad maybe buying a bigger harddrive & 128 mb of ram. Ofc some pci sound card to replace that integrated sound card because whew those sounds on duke nukem 3d. I'd guess this motherboard wouldn't support anything but the celerons on socket 370 as well, or at least it's not documented if you can put in a pentium III which would be a solid upgrade for this machine with like a coppermine pentium III 750 mhz - 1 ghz... Maybe you can have someone check out the bios file after cpu microcodes or patching in new ones. After dumping & uploading it somewhere as it seems to be an 810 chipset which does support all pentium III cpus with a 100 or 66 mhz bus speed on other socket 370 motherboards. Would perhaps make for a video where you explore ATI's Truform technology at the time with that ati 9200 pci as well. Which is a precursor too something you might know more commonly as tesselation. Think that's gone on the steam version of half-life though.

I would turn it into a sleeper

Free is the best price ever. Even if the PC isn't the greatest 👍

What a cute anime girl figure :3

They were “Free”******* 😂 I remember these trash machines, it was one of those “wow, they nailed the marketing to offload this garbage hardware” moments when I saw them… then they became the bane of support techs everywhere.

I had the 500

btw astolfo identifies as a boy.

"this computer is NEVER OBSOLETE" - i'm not so sure about that... also the fact that it still has all the stickers intact after so many years is simply incredible

The only problem I have with the hard drive "mounting" on the floor of the case is that it's metal to metal. Those drives produce some vibration and they have a small chance of getting damaged this way. Get yourself some 3M double-sided foam mounting stickies and put some down between the case and the drive.

It will always be crippled by the fact that the "AGP Graphics" are integrated from the intel Southbridge chip, and there is no actual AGP expansion slot. But I would still throw like $40 at it... IDE-CF adapter rather than spinning rust. A simple Celeron to Pentium swap. More RAM. A PCI bus GPU. Soundblaster. Ethernet. Check the PSU for Capacitor Plague?

I worked on legions of eMachines; the most common complaint was the power supplies would die. In the original generation of eMachines,the PSU was actually a little too lightweight. After about a year to a year and a half, they began installing slightly better PSUs and it seemed to fix the problem. I bought the upgraded PSUs as a retrofit to the earlier machines. My boss at work had his PSU go out, and he brought me the machine to fix. I ended up installing a standard ATX, and had to carve up the back of the case to get it to fit. It's not everyday a techie uses a dremel to fix a computer....lol

I grew up with a PC really similar to this. I've installed a flash card in it using one of those IDE adapters. Much more responsive than those death Maxtor drives of the 90s.

that was a sloppy drive

Always happy to see a fellow LGR fan!... wellp, that PC has some potential which is surprising considering it's running a Celeron, but I bet with 128 MB RAM and a somewhat decent PCI card (I actually think I have an FX5200 or 5500 around here somewhere) it could legitimately be a great old-school backup gaming PC.

Computers now are seemingly never obsolete lol. I use my core 2 duo from 2007 with windows 11 and it’s runs it fine without slowdowns or problems of any kind.

you'd probably wait a LONG time to find the correct caddy, but there are 5.25 bay to 3.5 hdd adapters that work pretty well

came because of emachine stayed cause of astolfo

I would have installed Windows 11 to test the "Never obsolete" claims.

It looks like music in Duke3D is in antiphase. Try reversing the polarity of one of the channels. By the way you can try some other modes for digital sound, something like Windows Sound System worked perfectly for my Crystal Sound card.

Those Crystal audio chipsets are ROUGH, lack of sound/janky-ass sound doesn't surprise me.

very good and informative video, thank you! been following for a while and know you will blow up big time

The sound issue with Duke Nukem 3D is primarily due to a poor emulation of Legacy DOS Sound Blaster under Windows by the built-in sound chip on this computer. This machine probably has a cheap ESS Solo sound chip that was notorious for its subpar Sound Blaster emulation in DOS back in the day. A sound card like the Yamaha YMF 744 may be able to fix this problem at least when running the game in DOS mode although you may have to disable the USB controller in the BIOS to free up IRQ 5 or 7 for it to work properly.

At my old job we had 1 of these that we got for free from a software vendor. It was in a kitxhen so it got extremely gross with all the oil and dust in the air, just like the rest of the machines in the kitchen area(designed to feed 3000ish people in a couple of hours.) After retiring from the kitchen I thoughly cleaned it and maxxed out the ram and I upgraded the cpu as much as I could, probably a 100mhz fsb Pentium 3 and a bigger heatsink. I finished it off by flipping the emachines logo upside down and called it the fallen emachine.

I got one of these, it failed a few months later but was under warranty. Best buy didn't have the exact same one so they gave me a system with a 750mhz duron 😆 I mean that was a big upgrade from the 533mhz celery 😅

You need to find the dos drivers for the sound chip and install that.

Those actually utilized that externally mounted PSU fan as a CPU fan as well, so I am guessing there was never a CPU fan on the heatsink.

Hard drive screws in flat to the front of the case. I had a emachines 400i as a kid, parents got it free as well by signing up for compuserve.

One things for sure, the case itself isn't obsolete 😂 Just swap out the board with a modern micro ATX or mini ITX board and you can rock modern hardware 😎

EMachines was bought by Acer then Acer shut it down LOL

This brings back memories. My first pc in high school was a eMachines.. I ran that sucker to the ground. I wish I had kept the case to run my home server from.

Seeing Arch neofetch on the background is heartwarming.

Emachines PCs was the first real upgrade I got from the really old custom build computers with no labels. Unfortunatly, my system had the Windows ME which crashed very randomly at times. Even when I was young I knew it wasn't the hardware because word got around that Windows ME was rushed to meet the Y2K craze. The system worked fine after I upgraded to XP and it lasted for a long time. It was truly the Dell quality back in the 90s

Great video until the horrible eargrape at the very end.

It wasn't free. You had to do Mail in Rebates which are unreliable and slow, plus the requirement of signing up for a subscription. It was not free. Most people will forget to do those rebates and end up paying full price. That's how they get you. Also, stop using on board sound cards. They were never meant for DOS. I had a Crystal sound card on a celeron machine back in 2000 and it doesn't do DOS sound properly at all. You need a dedicated sound blaster for that!

My uncle had that exact model. I played crappy games and surfed the web on dial-up every time I went over there. 🤣

I am pretty sure this was the box I had for my PC when I assembled it from stuff I scavenged from various bins lol

My mom did the mail in rebates for this

5:20 stuttering at that level is often causes by the dynamic loader bringing up game assets from the drive, which can be slow?

I had an old Emachines from the early 2000's all i remember is it had a 2.6ghz Celeron processor. And when Doom 3 came out, it ran like a slide show. HL2 ran way better than Doom 3 did.

Surprised that a little box with the last Mendocino Celeron and i810 video has, of all things, a DVD-ROM drive and a 15 gig hard drive. Figured you'd have also been working with a 32x CD-ROM and an 8.4GB drive for what this was going for even before the rebates.

The Duke Nukem 3D theme really made me laugh. Butchered beyond belief, sounded like someone was randomly poking on a synthesizer! That midi/soundblaster *brush* sound, heard it across my childhood but never looked upo what the "Instrument" is called, yea it was a bit TOO much of that, it kinda ruined the whole track. :)

The Intel integrated graphics from this era (which was based on the i740 discrete card which released in 1998) gets alot of hate, but it wasn't that bad. Performance is about equal to a 3DFX Voodoo 1 in most benchmarks, which means it can play most 1998 games at 640x480, 30fps. And anything that came before that very acceptably. DOS compatibility is good too. It could be alot worse, they could have stuck an S3 ViRGE in there. In 1999. Don't laugh, I saw it happen at the time. No Half Life for you! lol

okay we get it … you use arch …..

There used to be alot of stuff you could get free after rebates back then. Diskettes, cd-r discs, etc. The problem was you had to keep on those rebates. They were always trying to get out of paying them. I remember fighting with Iomega over a $50 rebate when I bought a zipdrive from them. Was a 3 month process and several phone calls, letters to get them to pay.

In 2015, my parents' elderly neighbor still had an old Pentium PC with something around 400 Mhz processing power and there was a sticker on it saying "20 years of use guaranteed!" (from a German dealer). The older gentleman didn't understand why he could hardly access the internet with Windows 98SE and 128mb RAM because "I was told it would last for 20 years!" 😶🤣 I also had a slightly larger CPU fan on my old AMD K-6 PC 24 years ago and glued it to the cooling frame with hot glue because that's how I read it. 😂

Thank you for the super chill video. I always love seeing these old machines get put back to good use.

i use arch btw

Gawd I remember eMachines were first sold, and the disappointment it caused me because of what I knew it represented. In essence, I thought it represented the eventual death of the PC repair business, a prediction that would eventually turn out correct. I was also a teenager at the time, and knew computer repair. I had a notion of fixing computers as a way to make money at first after high school, but I just knew this wasn't going to be possible. For the first time, it was possible to buy a shitbox PC for $500. Before then, the minimum entry price was at least $1,200ish, and most consumers would typically opt for something a bit better. Thing is, would *you* pay $200, 300 or more to fix a $500 shitbox PC? No, most folks are going to just buy a new one. And yes, between labor, diagnostics, and testing, something like a replacement of a $50 memory module would easily become $200, though if you needed $100 in memory modules, it would probably be $250ish or so. That assumes little to almost no parts markup, which no doubt some shops did. Up until that point, I was fortunate to have had access to a fairly, somewhat wide variety of computer equipment. Between that, and reading the PC Upgrade and Maintenance Guide, all 4,000+ pages of it back to back many times, I knew nearly everything there was to know about PC assembly and repair. Nowadays, it really is plug and play like fitting puzzle pieces together. It's so easy now, that I'd argue anyone who's somewhat handy could probably do it nowadays. There's a few possible gotchas, but they're less common than they used to be. I remember things like: 1) Manual jumper configuration for IRQ settings, I/O address range selection, DMA channel, etc. You had to make sure there was NO overlap. 2) If you plugged a serial port mouse into COM1, and your external modem to COM3, the mouse wouldn't work while you were connected to a dial-up ISP. Would you know why? 3) Most IDE cables have one pin-hole blocked out and the male connector typically had a notch to force correct insertion. The female interface connector on the drive also had a pin missing to prevent incorrect insertion. But some IDE cables didn't have a pin blocked out. Would you know what to do? 4) The IDE drives also had a notion of master and slave on the same IDE channel, which meant using jumpers to configure which device was which. While some IDE cables used the notion of "cable select" (master and slave is determined by which connector is used), this was rare and no one really used that. 5) Conner hard drives, a budget brand of Seagate often used in Packard Bell computers and some others, had the interesting quirk where if installed, the second hard drive on the same channel also had to be a Conner, or else it wouldn't work. 6) If you were lucky (and rich!) enough to use SCSI drives, you had to configure the SCSI ID numbers with jumpers too, and these numbers could go up to 15. ID 0 was reserved for the system/boot drive. 7) If you had any external SCSI devices, and scanners were often SCSI devices back then, you had to turn them on in a specific order - highest ID/farthest from the system, then next highest ID, and so on, until you finally turn on the system. Otherwise, some SCSI devices wouldn't be detected properly and work. 8) All floppy cables however, were "cable select." The primary/first floppy drive always had to be placed AFTER the twist in the cable. The second floppy drive had to be connected before the cable twist. Nevermind how that was often not convenient cable management. Even worse, older 5.25" floppy drives often had an older style of connector, which meant either an adapter had to be used, or to use a floppy cable with both types of connectors. 9) Speaking of cable management... due to non-modular power supplies and ribbon cables, cable management and airflow was a nightmare. 10) Early Plug and Play almost never worked the way it was supposed to. "Plug and Pray." It didn't actually start to get really good until probably Windows XP. 11) Early USB was atrocious and awful, and for a time a strong argument could be made to avoid USB as much as possible. USB finally got "good" probably around '08 or so. 12) Early 486s, and earlier CPUs, the sockets were not only perfectly square, but there was often nothing to physically prevent you from inserting it in 4 possible ways. You had to look at the socket carefully to find the marker for pin 1 on the socket, and which corner it was. And you had to make extra sure the marker on the CPU to indicate pin 1, lined up with it perfectly as well. If not, you will fry the CPU, and the motherboard, a potentially very expensive calamity. There was no safeguard against this other than basic due diligence. This isn't like AC power current where you could plug in the power plug either way and it would work. Sorry if I went on a bit down memory lane. Point was, in those days, it was an actual worthwhile skill folks were willing to pay for. It wasn't something anyone who's somewhat handy could likely do. Now, it is. Now it's more in the power user/enthusiast space. But yeah, after I saw the first eMachines for sale, nearly all the repair shops in my town closed within a few years after that. The eMachines brand may be gone now, but the $500 shitbox price point remained. For most folks, they'll just buy another one if anything goes wrong, and now there's more e-waste than ever. Same thing with smartphones, which often have very limited options for repair and tend to go bad every 2-3 years, possibly 4 years if you're lucky. Whereas a landline telephone, you could use the same one for decades. If you know how to assemble your own PC and fix problems as they occur, this can still save you money or offer you a better value. It's just not something the average person is really that willing to pay for anymore.

So a free computer every two years at $20/month? That's $480 for a new computer + dial up internet for two years.. I'm guessing this company was backed by a slight amount of venture capital that it basically just ran through, no wonder the Internet bubble burst.

sir after about 30yrs(maybe more like 25 but eh) of fixing computers I will tell you that it's perfectly acceptable(while no one is looking) to mount the 3.5in drive in the 5.25 inch bay using 1 screw to hold it:'D

One of my first computers was an emachine I bought back in ‘99 with a 300 AMD processor. Over its life I ended up replacing the 56K modem, the HD, the power supply, and upgraded the RAM. For what’s its worth these weren’t really that bad of computers but they were built cheaply as expected with the lower price tag.

in 2001, My Computer Programming Teacher hated this brand. He told me it was bad. I didn't believe him. He was right. lol

I remember this when it was new!

given the atx formfactor.. the CASE .. is never obsolete.. you can still stick a 13th gen intel mobo or ryzen board in it lol

interesting marketing, the late 90s and early 2000s were a wild time. Personally I‘ve given up on hard drives for flash with adapter.

🤔

Can we appreciate how well the person who owned this took care of it? Stickers are superb!

The stuttering is from the drive buffering and can't fully keep up. Access times and buffer size was really crap on these old low end machines.

Astolfo and Arch Linux on the background... the perfect combo ngl

OMFG!!! THATS THE GAME I WAS TRYING TO FIND WHEN I WAS A KID!! 4:50 nostalgia!!!!

so why you agreed to pay the extortion price. it would have been actually free. traders doing something good? nah mate

Hard drive on the floor of the computer gang where you at? I used to do this, have 3 ssds loose my gaming PC and possibly may do this in future. So i can't roast you for it

CompuServe was better than AOL. But in time I did switch to copper isp which was like 9 dollars a month

Great channel , now do a dell XPS 1000R project and test it out , it’s the one with rambus memory on it.

6-7 years ago i tried powering on my moms old emachine and it started smoking and shut off 😂

It seems like I heard something about cd drives helping with audio in some way? I may be reaching a bit though.

E machines were the worst computer's my grandma went through over 7 in a week back in the 2000s

Except you ended up paying thousands on hair transplant after you pulled every stand of hair from the frustrating e machine.

Even if not really free, if this included the monitor like the model in the ad, the price was not bad for the time (computers were certainly more expensive back in the day than they are now or have been in the last decade).

My first PC was the 500is. Even back then this whole line was obsolete out of the box 🤣🤣

I kinda wanna find one of these, take out the internals for preservation, then build a modern sleeper in one and tell people "Yeah, never obsolete!" XD

Omg. We had this crap in my house. It ran windows ME. Such a trash PC 😅

I used to have that same model PC. I nabbed it from a place bought out by sixflags.

I remember seeing lots of those in the garbage piles on the streets in NJ around 2003/2004

Well technically you could slap a new ATX board in there and it wouldn't be obsolete.

I have one like this with its original 10GB HDD and install on it. Might have to break it out soon

I remember that when I was in high school I'm not 38 years old

MOD it to run ATLAS OS windows 11 and break youtube

I had one or similar I think the power box was 150 wats

Why don't retro game stores ever sell old PCs?

Thank you for new video, i like retro computers.

4:04 - the HDD laying on the floor will not get roasted - it would if you hot glued it to the tower floor :-D

0:39 Those dial up contracts were 3 years, not 1.

Literally owned this PC.

On the bottom of the case is good. It allows the drive to use the case as a heatsink.

i remeber those but never got one. always heard negativity related to them.