The first upload broke somehow, so here’s another shot at it! Comments, views, likes, and other things weren’t showing publicly or updating at all, even though I saw things happening on the backend. Should be good now I hope.
Still holds true today. Upgraded my dad's laptop from 4 gigs to 16 and it was night and day for him. Then I replaced the hard drive with an SSD and he was like OMG.
Your first video on this computer really made me appreciate the fact that my dad opted for a 16MB system for our first computer in 1995. I never realized how limited Windows 95 was with only 8MB of RAM.
Especially when paired with other lower-end components and specs! And same, I didn’t know how good I had it with the 32MB Acer my parents saved up to get us in ‘97
@@howaboutsomesoyfood They were thinking the same thing PC manufacturers these days do (did?) selling full Windows 10 PCs with only 32GB eMMC storage. Saves them money and it does "work" just terribly
Same with the 486 DX2 I had in my youth. Arrived from Gateway 2000 with 8MB, but upgraded to 16MB and eventually 32MB before replacing the motherboard for a Super Socket 7 / AMD K6-2.
So happy to see you do more with the AST. So glad you took the email I sent and got it from eBay. Can’t wait to see you spec this thing out to the max 😃
_Having defeated the monster, Clint searches the cave and finds a bag containing RAM sticks._ But seriously, good video. Much appreciation for keeping older machines running. Still got my Win 95 machine, though it needs a few things to get it back up and running (I'll get around to it eventually).
My parents bought a Windows 98 Gateway Essential mid-level tower in 2000 for me for future use and education and stuff. By the 2010's it got lost to time by giving it to another brother who lost it in a house repo. Thankfully the original PC desk bought for it remained in my house. I'm more nostalgic now for vintage PC games and wanting the house to look like how it used to be, so I set off on eBay and Goodwill over the course of the last few years buying up the hardware I need. I still had all the original documentation and paperwork thankfully for the PC so I just looked at the build sheet and plugged that into eBay searches. I got the entire PC back now (including the exact monitor, that was the most expensive part) as an exact match but it's not fully set up yet. I am having a hell of a time finding the DVD-ROM drive I remember that was in there, it had to have been a transitional model drive because I found matching ones in black for XP era machines but not in beige.
@@MrWolfSnack: Same here. At the time, it made sense to donate our 8088-1 Headstart LX-CD computer to the school, but in retrospect, I deeply regret doing so. Who knew? That machine was a historical piece, and I would love a trip to the HomeComputerMuseum in the Netherlands.
Retailers loved these underspec'ed machines because it meant people would be back for upgrades sooner rather than later. I worked at Best Buy in the summer of 1995 and this PC was exactly what they told us to expect. Except for the brand that is. Circuit City sold AST. The strategy was to have everything underpowered except for the top end machines that sold for over $2,000, as it made the highest end PCs easier to sell. And if you couldn't afford the most expensive machine, you bought whatever you could afford, then upgraded it over time. And yes, 32 MB was a luxury in the early days of Win95, but that changed over time. Memory prices were volatile because Win95 increased the demand for RAM dramatically, but eventually the memory makers overproduced and that caused memory prices to fall out of the sky. It seems to me that was sometime in 1997 it happened.
Every time one of your Windows 95 machines is used and the startup theme plays, I always close my eyes and smile. For just a few moments, I'm spirited back to when I messed around with my Packard Bell back in that time frame and I'm younger for just a few moments. Thanks for that, Clint.
I had one of the 97 models of this computer! Edit: Man seeing these ASTs brings back tons of memories. These machines are what got me into computers. From games to the internet to building my own web pages and making my own games and levels. Those were the days!!
@@kaitlyn__L 32 GB is not that bad. It's my go to RAM capacity when building new PC. With DDR4, 16 GB is the absolute minimum. Going lower doesn't have good price to performance ratio.
I remember as a kid in '97 there used to be informercials on TV selling computers. "...it comes with 16MB of RAM, that's right, 16MB of RAM!!" But still, 32MB quickly became the baseline with '98. It always seemed to be a juggling act of what you could get away with using virtual memory. But honestly, today, doing basic stuff on a PC, there's no difference between 8, 16, 32, or even 64GB of RAM. Even if you have to dip into virtual memory, SSDs are stupendously faster than IDE drives of old.
@MattExzy I didn't realize that my parents gateway they bought in 98 or 99 was as much of a beast as it was until recently. Had 3 128mb ram sticks in it and a voodoo 3 gpu with 16mb. I played so much age of empires with it.
My Packard bell pentium 100 came with 8MB ram and windows 95. I couldnt play doom with sound without it locking up. I saved and saved and finally bought 32MB of EDO ram and it was wonderful! There was also a jumper on my Packard bells board that took it to 133mhz CPU clock
I watched your other video unboxing this PC. We had what I believe was this same AST computer. Then on my next PC, I had the same monitor you show in this video, the AccuSync 70... just crazy. We upgraded the RAM on this PC to 24 MB back in the late 90s. This video and the other one brought back so many childhood memories. Thank you!
Oof, that brings back memories....my first 286, and my little sister's then-boyfriend upgrading my computer, since at the time I didn't know anything about working on a computer. Takes the chips (I think they were 256k each) to one of his former hacker friends who ran a computer shop. He traded (I was there watching him) these chips for 2 1MB SIMMs, which I am pretty sure were pulls from another system, and then charged $40 each per MB. It was 1996. Just think, now I can pay $50 or less for 16GB DDR4. Ahhh, those were the days...they can KEEP 'em :) Thanks for the video...serves as a reminder of how we did things back in the day!
I'm sure one of the draws to this machine is that it is unaccelerated, but I'm curious to see just how much of a difference a 3DFX Voodoo would've made to a Pentium 100 back in 96.
I had an X5-133, so around the same as a Pentium-90. Adding the Voodoo 1 made a big difference, but you really didn't get the full advantage. Once I updated to a P200MMX it was really sweet.
IIRC upgrading my 486's RAM from 4 to 16MB was the first PC upgrade I ever did. I remember the owner of the repair shop in town coming back to the counter with a flimsy cardboard box full of old sticks with a look on his face that said both "have at" and "good luck" all at once. Man, did that upgrade make a difference.
I'm more a fan of doing it your way: put in all the memory, then only go back to one at a time if I have to troubleshoot. That way, if they do all work, you save a lot of time.
I have two ICL Ergo x451 Pentium 133MHz systems from 1996 which originally came with 32MB RAM but were later upgraded to 64MB and 128MB. They were still somewhat usable for web browsing in the mid to late 2000s
I had a similar spec PC at the time, only mine had a Cyrix P133 with 16 MB of memory. * Derp. I added a Voodoo and an extra 16 MB of RAM and it was like getting a new PC. What a difference it made! I made do with it until I could afford a shiny new Pentium III 450 system a few years later 🤘
For the fun of it I put two 128MB modules in a 486 machine I had laying around. Won't boot with just those in it, but if you add a smaller module in the first slot it will, and then you wait for the endless ram test 😆(the memory can be addressed, it just doesn't like high mb edo ram for some reason)
That's the exact computer I had in 1996 and those 8mb of ram were definitely not enough. I remember when we got back from the computer store with 40mb total. It blew my mind. Hover never ran so fast. 😂
DUDE!, i KNOW these machines!, they hired me to install 5 of them, and upgrade them with overdrive, cd drives and network cards in 1999! It was the first proper job i ever had!, they originally had just a 1.44 floppy drive and windows 95, i set them up, installed the upgrades in them, networked them and patched them to osr 2.5 It is EXTREMELY rare for a school to choose branded PC's here in Argentina, and even more back then. Amazing video! :D
If I recall correctly, there was only two factories in the world which made a special adhesive (or something like that for them) for the RAM. One of the factories blew up.
This was a nice computer with the exception of its RAM amount. A crucial upgrade if I do say so myself. Throw in some more L2 cache and an early Voodoo and you'll be ballin'.
Someone in 1996: "Carefully remove the RAM from the anti-static bag, make sure you're grounded... careful, that thing cost $300!" Clint in 2023: "I think I have a bag of RAM under the stairs."
My first Pentium computer, an Acer Pentium 75 purchased in I believe early 1995, we went to buy 8 more MB of RAM, and the store accidentally gave my dad two 16 MB sticks. That was an expensive mistake in those days. Like a "you're fired" level mistake. I had more memory in my home PC than anyone I knew for quite a while.
@BilisNegra Yes, computer came with 8, we were trying to upgrade to 16 total. Somehow, the guy managed to give us two unbelievably expensive 16 MB SIMMS instead of the two 4 MB SIMMS we had paid for.
My first comp, in 93, was an Acer 486 SX25, 4meg ram, 170meg drive, and no L2 cache. Just playing Doom, going from 4 meg to 8 in ram doubled the 'smoothness' (no one talked FPS then), and then convincing my dad to get the L2 cache doubled it again.
I have one large box of hunreds of those. They are all 4 and 8s as I have used up all the bigger ones. I have one of those AST machines. I bought it and the laser sticker was still on it so it had never been opened. That was cool. It was hardly used to. Nice machines.
Spent so much time tweaking my computer back then just to get a couple more FPS. Felt like a victory every time. This carried over to Win 95 and XP, eventually I stopped clocking my boot time etc :)
@@Skidd2 10 second boot time? My main PC takes like 20 seconds just to post lol Though I don't really care about boot times because my PC is running 24/7 anyway
I vaguely remember the old family PC with a Cyrix 6x86 and Tseng Labs ET6000 (I think, maybe an ET4000) getting upgraded from 32MB to 192MB RAM so my aunt could install WinXP on it for us. Then a few years later we got a 2Ghz Athlon XP with 256MB DDR and promptly upgraded it to 1GB.
I had a Packard Bell Legend 2000 when I was younger that was similar to this, so I know what you mean about this being the kind of thing average people would have and we'd just figure out ways to make the best of it. I upgraded what I could, starting with the VRAM that PB had to upgrade for free because the included 512KB wouldn't even provide the resolutions advertised on the box. I then upgraded the actual RAM, then I believe the hard drive, and eventually everything until the point when it was a totally new PC. I kinda wish I hadn't done that now, though; I've been looking for another one for a long time and they're just not common. But I definitely remember that struggle of trying to get your bog-standard Best Buy dorm room computer up to the standards required to play decent games, and the satisfaction that came when you managed to upgrade it effectively. I remember that most of us had never seen a real graphics card or CPU upgrade (within the same machine) at that time so when I did both to my computer, I was like "whoa!"
You should try getting Total Annihilation run on these; the game itself had very low minimal settings for an early windows era and was an impressive feat in terms of tech/graphics. Really nice benchmark, especially considering it still required CD for the soundtrack and some data, depending on your installation type.
If in doubt about the kind of memory sticks you need, you can travel back in time, contact AST customer service over the phone and maybe David (Murray) will be answering at the other end!
Oh man! I know it’s a blerbs but I was hoping for that quick cut to two days later and that video mem chip being installed. Be very interested in that video!
Lions were such kings with 32MB in 1997. Running XFree86 without swap space, web browsing was just insane. Just a few years earlier, that was the territory of $10,000 workstations.
I remember doing this to a windows 3.11 machine, it had 8mb, and a 75 mhz processor, ran ok, bumped the ram up to 32, and it went like stink. My dad said that's a lot faster! i said its amazing how much more ram can make a difference.
I did a similar thing with DIMM RAM slots on a 486, the procedure to insert them is annoying but I would be lying if the sound it makes isn't satisfying as hell. Also I remember until the late 00s I recall the standard "Boost your PC performance" procedure was to boost the RAM which now seems to have been superseded by "Get an SSD" for the most part.
Back in 1996 my dad had an Olivetti Pcs 44/C cpu was a Intel 486 SX 25 Mhz and 8 Mb ram 512 kb video ram and 240 mb harddrive and 1,44 mb floppy ,no sound card only pc speaker and no cdrom drive, it was running ms dos 6.22 and windows 3.1 ,it was good for dos games and word perfect, it became my first pc later and I installed a sound blaster 16 vibra value card and a cdrom drive 24x speed but it was not fun getting that to work in a Italian stubburn small desktop pc, I had to get the local pc store to get the sound card and cdrom to work it was not playing ball ;) allso same store where I bought the sound card and cdrom drive, but one day I droped it on the floor so somthing on the motherboard went bad somehow so it went to scrap after that.
For like 10 years, I had an 8MB SIMM on my key chain LoL. Back in 1996, 8MB SIMMs were about $600. Flooding the market with cheap RAM is the ONLY thing I will ever praise China for. RAM prices were so stupidly high, there was an epidemic of criminals breaking into offices to steal the RAM from PCs.
As a preteen in the late 90s I got a huge bag of mostly 72pin ram from a bankrupt store, wound up screwing a Mobo to the wall and using it to test ram. At some point near the end of the bag I must have killed the cache because it wouldn't test known good sticks as good.
OKOK, you got me here, PLEASE, upgrade this one AS MUCH as you can, "get it all"! XD (full ram, osr2.5, 3d accelerator, soundcard and whatever else you can, i will watch the HECK out of that series!) (do not change the motherboard!)
I just did my first PC build since the early 00s, and I really miss working on these machines. Less glow-y, more beige, and much, much less... Temperamental than modern hardware.
Same. Recently built my first PC since 2010 but my first build was in 2001. However you know you can turn off RGB ? I hate RGB and have all mine turned off (except for on the ram because I Don't see any options to turn off ram RGB).
@@Gatorade69 No idea. I have the same problem, but with the CPU fan. I have 3 or 4 programs installed to control all of that stuff (1 from the mother board manufacturer, 1 for keyboard, one for graphics card, 1 for GPU, etc, etc). I think it really depends on the component and the manufacturer. I don't think there's any one "standard" app or interface. At least, I couldn't find one.
In the late 90s I was old enough to roam freely in those large supermarkets my parents shopped at. I always saw those Pentium II machines but then 16 MB RAM. I'm always like why?!? They ripped those people out big time.
My first computer in end of 2000s had 64Mb of ram. And, worse than that, it had an integrated GPU (Nvidia Alladin) that used system RAM as video ram. You could define in BIOS the ram to give to GPU (Default from factory was 16Mb), leaving 48Mb avaiable for Windows millenium. My pentium 3 had the same amount of memory a friend of mine had on its 166Mhz computer, but he had a dedicated 3D gpu. It was bought on supermarket. The trick at time was to put a good CPU and HDD and cheap on everthing else. At time 128Mb were the "normal" for a Windows Millenium machine from late 2000s, and 256 was awsome. Windows ME was slow with so little memory. WIndows Media Player 7 took ages to open. Eventually i got 98SE installed and became faster, but it was until i got more 64Mb ram stick from my cousin that my machine started to move a little. Supermarkets really capped their pcs. At time i din't know much about computers, i only knew i wanted a pentium 3 computer with a 20gb hdd. I learn about computer hardware from that time on. Before i got RAM upgrade, i installed XP to check what XP looked like with that little ram. XP on 48Mb of ram is veryyyy slow.
@@sjogosPT At the time I had a Pentium MMX 166 MHz but I had 128 MB RAM and it ran Win98 fine and the RAM I got for free because everyone wanted the then new SDRAM-DIMMs not the old 72 pin SIMMs so I had plenty. Yeah of course those manufacturers sold the newest platform where upgrading was expensive, the smart people got a Super Socket 7 and some AMD K6 for example and way more RAM than a fast Pentium 3 but little RAM and integrated graphics. Some i810 based Celeron systems were even worse. And with the first Pentium 4 and Rambus Intel really went way too far and Athlon won. Windows Media Player 7 was a catastrophe and even when I had a Millennium machine i would find out that you could just run mplayer2.exe to get the old media player and set that as default.
Additional VRAM is more for higher resolutions I believe, it cant hurt though. I think I sent you some that should work if it takes 40 pin SOJ chips, marked "EliteMT M11B416256A-25J". (Dug out the purchase email real quick, lol) If you can find a COAST module that works for that machine, that should help with quake quite a bit.
Hey Clint! You might be interested in the MemTest86 RAM stress testing/diagnostic utility. I believe Memtest86 supports hardware back to 286 era CPUs and RAM types.
I had the IBM version of this exact computer as my first PC. I upgraded the video memory, and it had a faulty CMOS battery cage that if you didn't properly configure after every reboot would only run at like 10Mhz.
So back in the late 90's. I decided to to a little test. Now I can't remember 100% everything but it was windows 95 and I'm sure some Pentium machine. I wanted to know what the difference was. 4 to 8 megs. Big difference. 8 to 16 you could print without noticing any difference. But for just having windows open and doing a few things. No bother at all. One problem is cost. Memory prices would go up and down and when I did that it would be another $300+ for the ram. So if you are already spending $1,200 on a machine with 4 megs of ram. That extra 300.00 was a good chunk of change. Though we did sell tons of machines with 8megs of ram.
Same with Quake. My friend had a P100 and it definitely wasn't that choppy on the first level. He even played it in a resolution higher than the default.
I have a laptop 380ED, 166Mhz. 320x240 is perfect. 640x480 its playable but have low framerate. Based on this, i dont think a pentium 100mhz could play Quake higher than 320x240 fast. At time we were less picky about framerates. Back in the day, i played anything unless it cames to single digit fps, but ofc, today we have higher standards.
Watching this and the original reveal video kills me... I grew up with an AST Advantage Adventure 6066d in this exact form factor. We upgraded our 486DX2/66 version to a 5x86DX4/133. I'd love to find one these myself. One day. 😢
oh god, I need to play Pod again.. got it back in the days packaged with my Voodoo1 card, and spent hundreds of hours racing my friends. I wish there was any modern sequel to it. Rollcage came quite close, but even that franchise only lived two releases.
Oh man, those RAM slots. All i could always think of while installing RAM into them was "don't bend the pins! don't bend the pins! don't bend....oh nothing happened."
3:50 Small world, I have that exact same core memory art piece you have next to your monitor! Picked up one of the DGC Nova 16K boards while I was there too
