Troubleshooting the 1996 Micron Millennia 

Be glad you were able to recover the system from having the wrong BIOS flashed so easily! Almost 25 years ago, my husband tried to update the BIOS and a similar thing happened -- several versions of the motherboard, not BIOS cross-compatible -- but that motherboard didn't have any way to recover from a failed BIOS flash. Fortunately, a few days later, he was going through a drawer at the place we both worked with some dead motherboards, and found the exact same model/variant he had just broken. He got permission to take the board, so he harvested the socketed BIOS chip and swapped it into his dead motherboard, and voilà! He was then *_extremely_* careful when he flashed the BIOS again. 🤣

4:27 you most likely already know but if you don't, Necroware has made a VRM board to fit precisely in those headers

I spent my summer in 1998 working for the company that did phone tech support for Micron (a terrible job, by the way) - I troubleshooted more than my fair share of that exact model. I'm a huge fan of those anodized passive heatsinks too - I'm surprised I haven't really seen something like them in other brands of PCs from back then.

Between 1998 and 2001, I worked at a place where one of the machines we used to do demos was actually just a pile o' parts sitting on the conference room table: A motherboard sitting on an anti-static bag, power supply and hard drive just sitting next to it, monitor plugged into a video card just sticking up out of the motherboard... and usually at least a couple of $10,000 telephony cards. Our conference room also did double duty as our lunch room, and one exciting day, with a demo happening later that afternoon, during lunch I knocked over a can of Coca-Cola and nearly flooded it. 🤣🤣

I hadf a Micron Millenia as a work computer back in the late 1990s. It was a later version of the computer (PII-233, slot 1, 440LX chipset) but the case was identical. They clearly used the exact same case for several generations of computers. In fact, when my work computer was upgraded after a few years to a (IIRC) P4, and the old one was going to get scrapped - I asked if I could take it instead. And they gave it to me, minus hard drive. I still have the case and floppy/CD drives from it (the motherboard is long gone). At some point about 15 years ago I turned it into a hackintosh - put a motherboard from a G3 beige Mac in it. It's still in this configuration and still working to this day - yeah it has the floppy drive but of course that's not connected to anything. :)

Growing up in Boise, I had so many Micron computers and got to tour that factory at least 5 different times. Being between the ages 10 - 18 of It was awesome every time!

The out of the box experience was pretty good because of the Win98SE disc which came out in 1999. By that time 1996-era cards like the Vibra, S3 and Voodoo had been out for awhile and Microsoft could just bundle the drivers for them.

I’m amazed at the plethora of old tech I’ve forgotten about that I used to sell when I built custom PC’s back in the late 90’s early 2000’s. Apart from the occasional high end custom game PC I get requested to build I only sell Lenovo now for laptops, PC’s and servers. A custom UNIX server I built back in 2003 came back into my possession a few months ago when I converted it to a VM for my customer. I turned it into a DOS game PC using all the original hardware I built it with minus the tape backup drive.

The CPU cooler looking like a grinder makes this PC awesome.

TIP, copy the win98 directory on to the HDD from the CD and then run the setup. This way when Windows needs to get filers, they are on the HDD and it will get them without asking for the CD.

Shelby, you can always mix and match parts from the Dell Dimensions made at this time too since its the same chassis with Dell branded faceplate.

This is the second video I have watched on RU-vid from this week showing a system with QIK tape storage, LGR did show a system with a 250 MB capacity and how it worked.

"WHAT I HAVE HERE IS A-" YESSS TechTan upload! -me already stoked af Dude you have an ability to even make TROUBLESHOOTING neat and interesting (obviously once packaged together and edited after your many hours of research and frustration😅)

The Iomega Ditto tape drives had a separate Ditto Dash ISA card for faster speed. It was a double speed floppy controller with a single port. Before affordable CD writers and drive imaging software, this was a good system for backups.

I had one of these exact desktops...or rather the MMX version of the system with the 266 as a kid... Sadly I got mine infected with the virus bundled with the game demo for SiN, I don't quite know/remember what GPU I had it bundled with but it was quite the beast of a machine for me at 7-8, long days of playing Doom, and Shadow Warrior and Duke Nukem 3D

i remember that at least the 250mb style qic80 tape drives (different manufacturers) that i installed in the 90ies came with adapter cables in the box. these allowed you to install two disk drives along with the tape drive on a single standard floppy controller. there was neither extra switching hardware-wise nor special software involved to get that setup running.

What an iconic name... They dominated many ads for PCs I drooled over as a kid! Also, what a weird configuration.... ATX's popularity is late enough in the game that this must have been a super budget system by the time it was manufactured.

For the hard drive mounting, at least in the Dell equivalent, there was an option to mount it vertically underneath all of the other drives provided the required long screws were on hand. The Dell beige plastic bracket may be required to do that, though. Dell used a very similar case to this Micron Millennia starting with the Pentium 1 and going into the Slot 1 Pentium III era.

Thanks for the video. Necroware just did a video on making a power mod to run MMX cpus that fits the slot on your motherboard.

The 3-com ethernet card was likely installed by the cable company when they got broadband. I use to work for Shaw Cable and I got the joy of doing plug and pray thousands of those cards.

My aunt had one of these. Ran Win2k. I remember playing with it around year 2000-2002 at her place. I remember trying to download the latest SP for it at their place but then realizing just how slow 56k was, gave up. Also this PC case reminds me a lot of the Dell dimension/XPS cases from around the same time period.

A modular SFX PSU makes large old cases much easier to work on! You just have to make sure the cables have enough length or add some extenders/splitters for the molex cable. Another good thing is that you can leave out certain cables like the PCI-E and maybe even the SATA cables for a much neater build!

Never seen dell dimension style case used in another manufacturers before 😳 Atleast the back, both sides and inside reminds me from my old dimension r350

The Palo Alto Atcx case has got to be one of the best ever. I had a millennia mme (200mmx) in tower configuration and bought a couple more generic versions of the case that I used in desktop config. I now have none. 😭 Arstechnica even reviewed it way back when. I think you can still find the article in their archives. You appear to missing the back half of the vertical drive bay cage that lets you mount one to the bottom front part of the case. You should be able to put one there anyway if you have a couple of screws long enough.

For 1996 that seems like an incredibly futuristic case. Very early for ATX too I think? (Quick google says Intel patented it in 1995) Either way modern ATX PSUs often aren't great with older PCs because with shifting revisions of the ATX standards, basically the entire focus has been shifted to the 12v rails, with the 5 and 3.3v rails diminished and the -5v rail removed entirely. One of those PicoATX thingies might actually be a better choice at this point.

8:47 You can also 3D print a 3.5” holder for the SD-to-IDE adapter, it is publicly available and works very well. This way, you don’t need a blanking plate where the Iomega Ditto was.

Watching "Investigating Massive Assortment of PCs" and now this, makes me want to rummage through my old hardware and cases to slap a 98 or XP retro machine together.. :D

1:36 - My first CDROM drive, exactly like that, the whole unit came out

Bring back the memories. I was in college in 2000 - 2004. They had been donated dell xps t700r machines that used the same case design. I am sure other models too. A vertical hard drive was installed underneath the hd slot you used. The label side side faced in and and two long 6-32 screws from the front.

That heatsink spin though. Love it.

1:35 Yes, the Mitsumi alligator jaws drawer CD drive. I had one of them.

that's probably the coolest (no pun intended) cooler I've ever seen in a retro machine.

awesome... The first computers I bought for the company I worked for were microns.. That brings back memories.. (until I showed up - they bought compacts from a local IT company $$$...)

I remember when I was a kid, there was a Micron computer store that somewhat nearby. I remember going in there and seeing some of the computers opened and getting to see inside of a computer. Strangely I had weird ideas as a kid thinking that a computer case would be jam-packed with electronic parts and that is why there was such a huge case. I am not sure, but this may have been the first time seeing one opened and getting to the realization there is a lot of open and empty wasted space. However I was transfixed on this futuristic looking cpu cooler and the guy was talking about the parts and said that was the cpu. I didn't exactly register entirely that it was a heatsink, the concept was still somewhat foreign to me. I just remember seeing that and always wanted a cpu like that. It was just so cool looking. I later purchased and built my very first pc and realized that the heatsink wouldn't likely work too well as they all require fans for cooling now. Still, there have been times over the years where I see these micron pc's and still the heatsink is fairly cool looking to me. I have owned plenty more exotic and nifty looking heatsinks and have sold and got rid of many of them, still whenever I see this micron one again after all these years, it just makes me feel nostalgic and it was just a weird time of wonderment by these computers and me just really wanting one, but for a long time we didn't have a home pc. My dad did, he had a 486 133mhz amd system and he wanted to give us his old 386, but I am not sure any of us would have known how to use it. Sure my mom used unix at her work at the time, but I guess I could have learned to use the command line somewhat and I did later. If only I had the time to actually enjoy retro computers. I really should start selling all my old parts and computers tho. I almost wish I kept every era of pc I had intact. I can still enjoy youtube content of it tho.

Flippin' heck - Second Micron Millennia YT video I've seen this week. @MikeTech pulled one apart earlier - his didn't have the cool CPU heatsink but it was a MMX P1.

Very common that bios on motherboards of this era only support 8GB hard drives.

Nice job! Back in the day, you didn't have the internet to help. Mostly Vendor sites, BBS', and Magazines! You're lucky the wrong BIOS didn't brick the board. Also... I believe Micron was the last American manufacturer. The $100 foreign boards were $1000 for the same specks! But they did work come consistently. The biggest problem I found was foreign memory. I'd come in and drop a couple Micron modules in and it would become rock stable! I had customers who thought Windows was unstable. They'd reboot several times a day. Until they got good memory. At least you're using the PCI era boards. Back in the day you had to set jumpers to set memory locations for interrupts. There were times when you simply couldn't put everything you wanted to because you ran out of interrupts and memory locations. People mod their cases these days because they don't have to work to get everything working! Thanks for the video!

Oustanding video as always, Shelby. We love you over here in Aus mate. Keep up the great work!

Gotta love those cylinder-looking passive CPU heatsinks.

I have a Micron just like this that I bought on eBay. I love the case design. When I was taking C++ classes in the mid-90s, the lab at my local community college was full of these.

Wow! What are the odds we both released videos featuring a Micron Millenia this weekend! 🤣

27:05 Ah good ol POD. So it's not just LGR who uses it to test out various 3dfx cards.

Brass threaded stand-offs can mount anything. Buy a kit. Oh, and mark the partition active.

Super cool video! Your comment about the early 3d era being wild is totally on point.

I think it's cool to have that weird looking test bench computer on your desk, so when new viewers come they'll be curious about it and maybe it'll be their introduction to the concept of a test bench. Ask me how I know : )

Man, I first got my toes wet in Voodoo a few years back with a Voodoo 1, stuck it in my maxed out Packard Bell Multimedia, of which originally I ran an MMX overvolted, then switched to a K6 III with interposer. I remember having those EXACT issues with pod to begin with, and I have both the POD OEM PB release and the POD Gold release...

i see through a lcd monitor but i feel and see this monitor of yours looks very relaxing for the eyes... it was the time when change "made in USA" ...

If you really like the OEM memory in there, get one of the new "vintage" ram tester boards made in the last few years and replace any bad chips. It's not that difficult a solder job.

Those SD to IDE mounts can be fit on a rear bracket, you might be able to print one, then you can also access the card from the back.

This was a very nice watch. I have two non MMX Pentium microns, a tower and desktop, with that nifty looking heatsink. You never know what you will run into when you acquire another machine approaching 30 years old as the untampered ones are very rarely seen and usually we wind up with something someone else has tinkered with.

Feels like every build I experienced in the 90s.

VERY similar to the PC I first purchased on my own, a Micron with a Pentium 133 and a 2GB SCSI HDD.

8:37 there's this stuff I have called Alien Tape. I used it to mount the mod chip in my ps1. In terms of strength... I have a d-link right angle usb extension attached to my emachines xp build. I can pick up the entire computer from that d-link extension.

I have a similar Millenia (same Motheroard but P133). Mine still has the original W95 install on it. This board has a Goldfinch connector to upgrade this Vibra to a AWE32 with a CT1920 card.

i have a pentum 3 era micron millennia and apart from a different front panel the case is pretty much identical to that one. unfortunately all of the weird toolless parts like that fan and hard drive holder (and one on the 3 1/2" floppy drive too) were missing so i had to make a few modifications in order to put that stuff back in. the case was in really rough shape when i got it, so i didn't feel too bad about butchering a few parts. i also reconfigured it to be a horizontal desktop instead of a tower, the 5 1/4" drive cage could actually come out and be rotated, though i dont think it is intentional given the slightly wider base, which just hangs off the edge of the desk now.

The late 90s we had a Pentium 233mmx on a Super socket 7 board with a 3d blaster Vooddo Banshie and Sound Blaster live value. I miss that computer

The OEM for those Micron and similar Dell computers was Palo Alto the case model was the ATCX. The case is pretty modular if you take the face plate off and remove a single screw you can remove the 3.5 and 5.25 cage.

Hey Shelby, it's great to see that you got the Micron going! It's good that at least on the hardware side it was just some bad ram and that was a good catch on the bios issue. Honestly, I'm surprised that the bios on that is flashable... most machines that old were eeprom chips and not flash memory. Those old Caviar drives are awesome too... Our first family system had a Caviar 11000 (1Gb) and the sound of them is quite distinctive, especially when they startup and go through their self diagnostics. Your systems looks like it's a bit older than mine, as mine is a normal ATX board and doesn't have the mounted cable connected connectors. I think the VRM on mine is built in as well, I don't remember it having a separate one and it's definitely dual voltage and I'm running a 200MMX in it. Ironically, I also have a voodoo in mine (my first ever) but I think I paired it with a Matrox Millennium for 2D. Not 100% if your case is the same but as the one I have is the one Colin at LMG did the sleeper build in, it had a large hole drilled in the bottom steel. The bare metal chassis was the exact same as the PII/PIII era Dell Dimensions and I had one that the plastics weren't great on (and I already have a few anyway). I was able to swap all the Micron plastics onto the Dell chassis and it all swapped perfectly. If you ever want yours to be restored (the brace at the PSU), that should be a way to do it, plus those Dells aren't too hard to find. I believe mine is dated 1997, and was originally a P166MMX, but Colin kept the original CPU because of that gorgeous anodized heatsink. For the tape drive, maybe see if you can find an IDE Zip drive. My system came with one in that spot, and they're period correct and still handy for moving files around especially if you also have a USB external zip drive too. I just wish I was able to catch your live stream where you were diagnosing it!

this whole video feels familiar when setting up retro computers and when it's finally ready for games, i'm too tired to play 😴

Some older 3.5" drives gets unhappy mounted upside down. Something to check in the datasheet.

Congrats on just works hardware! I'm reminded of the rarely heard xp install music

Wow! That's the case from a bunch of Mac Clones! Where you have the gfx card installed is where the ADB bracket goes!

You can use the appropriate version of MaxBlast (Maxtor version of EZ-Drive) for your 40GB Maxtor HDD if you want to override the bios limitation of your system (even if it will still be limited to ATA 33 I/O speed instead of UltraATA 60/100). Sometimes, the HDD detection problem can also be solved by using a different ATA cable (another 40 pins 80 wires UltraATA cable or a classic 40 pins 40 wire ATA 33 cable). Edit : it's quite wholesome that the wrong bios update can be reversed. By choosing to install Win98SE instead of Win95,that's quite to be expected for not needing any third-party driver on a standard system (S3 Virge, Creative Vibra 16, usual 3Com ethernet card, Voodoo 1) that is at least three years older than the OS. BTW, a Matrox Millenium or Mystique can be a nice update to the S3 Virge, the video signal quality will be improved, especially when used with a Voodoo 1 on a CRT monitor. Oh, and if you want to expand the possibilities of Windows 98 you can also install NUSB (if you install a USB 2 PCI card) to use flash drives and external USB HDD (NTFS supported with NTFSDOS Professional 5 and NTFS Reader 2.1) or other USB peripherals. You can also add useful utilities like MCDU Plus 3.1 and KernelEX if you want to experiment Windows XP software on this machine. And if you keep the same graphics setup, DirectX 5 is the last version that can use this hardware.

The design language of the case similar to these Dell machines around the same era. Makes me wondering if Dell and Micron collaborated somehow during that period.

4:54 incredible demonstration of tool-less removal using a tool. :P

This kind of thing still happens to this day. I had a person bring me a laptop that wouldn't update past Windows 10 build 1709. I was too deep in other things to work on it, and he wasn't able to leave it, so I downloaded the Update Assistant, and told him to try that when he got home. A couple weeks later he comes back, and had taken it to another shop, and they wiped the drive and tried a clean install, which did not resolve the issue. He was able to leave it with me, so I went through and checked everything myself, no change. Updated the motherboard's firmware, and BAMM!!!, it updated to the latest build. A lot of people balk at updating the motherboard BIOS (and honestly if you don't know what you are doing it's best to leave it a professional in some cases) but it honestly should be one of the first things checked.

I could bet money that the case manufacturer did older beige Dell Dimension/XPS cases too, very similar. What I liked about them was that they were very slim.

I had a Micron Pentium Pro machine for a while. Kind of wish I still had it, but I sold it a few fests ago in pursuit of more unique fare.

that heat sink alone, perfection

I had a win98 on a hard drive with so many system visited, it was some rare occasion if it detected some new hardware if it was put in a new system to troubleshoot and stuff..

Those Floppy-Tape drives are connected in parallel to the existing 1 or 2 floppy drives in the system as a "third" drive.

I really like the computer and that bios issue was a massive puzzle which I don't envy you for having had to face.

I have this exact computer with the VRM upgrade though. Was my grandfathers. No issues with it whatsoever

POD was one of the best from the golden era of PC gaming. No pay to win, no subscriptions, no accounts, no loot boxes, and didn't need to be online,

I recognize this case. It looks very similar to Dell Dimension XPS d333, but with a different front panel.

I had a Pentium 150 MMX Millenia as my first real 586 box. Memories. irrc they came with a modem, V330 diamond video card, 3com 3c905 nic, SB16 ISA card (maybe we added that, dont remember anymore) Later had many more Micron's. I remember them being a little faster than everything else in benchmarks since they'd customize the motherboard and other parts to just squeak ahead of the competition. They were partially a company that originally started out as (I think?) ZeOS in the twin cities.

Never had a CPU with such a cool looking passive cooler I love it ❤

Another great vid. Cheers!

that case was used by almost every oem system manufacture for years i had dell P3 1ghz that had that same case

man that's a cool case! the only p1 i have is in a compaq 1530DM laptop

i have a slightly later dell variant of this board with sdram and i can confirm it does not like a flat cmos battery

17:03 I've had this exact same problem! Linux was able to detect the rest of the drive once it booted from a partition below 8.5gb, though

(shudders) Ptsd flashbacks to my early days with Windows 98, pre second edition at that. Urgh! The number of clean boots Dad and I did with that Gateway machine. We also went through three EV-700 monitors too.

This is a pretty sweet machine and those first ATX implementations were often a little weird with the ports, I remember Gateway's of this same era with something similar going on. This was also when we first started seeing USB ports, does this motherboard have a header? Also the 5 1/4" drive is a little strange for an ATX Pentium machine, wondering if that came from factory... seems unlikely.

Just shows how the landscape of PC's has changed. Basically the wild west of PC building 90's-2000's, no standards hardware was just soo specific and all over the place. I definitely want to build a win98 machine though.

Just when I thought I heard of every iomega drive a new one I didn't know about comes along

wow, I've seen a number of period dells in this case, and now this computer. must have been a common OEM thing

keep making videos thees videos are the bes i watch a lot of tech guys on youtube but i thinck you are one of the best on youtube between MJD 8bit guy and lgr

3com support on Windows 98 was actually pretty good out of the box. Especially with 98SE.

6:10 - That CD burner is most definitely *NOT* "standard for the era". 40x12x48 drives didn't come out until the 2000s (it looks like that precise drive came out in 2002.) Even CD-R 2x drives were rare in Pentium-era computers. Heck, the Plextor 8x CD-R / 20x CD-ROM read drive only came out in 1999, and CD-RW was only officially a standard at all in 1997, well after the Millennia was released. That optical drive is an upgrade made at least 5 years after the system was released.

You should try and set the multiplier up one and over clock it, rumours we’re back in the day that Intel only ever made 200 mhz chips and labelled the speed accordingly to there stock levels they needed.

The system probably doesn't support LBA for some reason. I think an XT-IDE might be of some help here to let you get the full 32GB. I had to use one to do that for a 32GB SD card on my 486 machine.

Those Maxtor slims explode

That case looks oddly similar to my first Dell, only that one was a Slot 1 Pentium 3

Regarding the inability to use a 40GB hard drive: I had a Gateway 2000 P5-200 of the same vintage as your Micron Millenia. (At the time, the clones to get, if you couldn't afford Compaq, HP or AST, were Micron, Dell and Gateway 2000, although I avoided Micron due to frequent reports of uncooperative tech support. Love that tool-less case, though. One thing you got used to with Gateway was screws -- lots of 'em.) Computers of this vintage were mostly still using the original IDE spec, or maybe it was the 2nd revision, and only supported hard drives of up to 9.6GB capacity. Those were the pricey hard drives, though, so in you'll find a lot more surviving 8.4GB drives nowadays. I wanted a 9.6GB drive for my Gateway because, well, just because, really (as I never came close to filling its original 3.8GB hard drive), but I think I eventually settled for a 8.4GB drive because it was what I could afford.

Looks like Star Wars Pod Racer 😊

That tape drive is more generally called a Travan drive, developed by 3M. It's a slowish tape technology that can only backup 1.6 gigabytes per tape, and it does that by taking multiple passes through the tape, writing one track at a time. I have a similar model from a different manufacturer though a recent retro-computer purchase. I can't figure out any real use for it either.

You need two things: Windows 95D Lite, which will take too much explaining if you haven’t heard of this yet but it will play nice with your Voodoo. Second, you should try Ontrack Disk Manager. This is meant to format the hard drive to its full capacity if it’s larger than this systems 8.4gb limitation.

It is way faster to copy the Win 98 directory from the CD to the HD and install windows from the HD. It is also helpful if you are using the PC as a test bed for other devices. That trick also works for Win 95 and Win ME.

That looks like the same case as the Umax S900 Supermac mac clone (apart from the front bezel of course.)