Restoring a 1997 Gateway PC! Windows 95 Pentium 2 Desktop

[MMX-compatible jazz music plays] [computer buzzes, beeps] - I have a neat computer from 1997, but I don't know much about it or even if it works, so let's just dive into it! [jazz continues, PC plops down] Greetings and yeah, what we got here on LGR this time is a computer that I do not know a whole lot about. And that is exciting! At least it is to me. Obviously, it is a Gateway 2000 from late 1997, I think. It's a G3-266, one version of it anyway. And yeah, this is a Pentium 2 MMX machine, as

suming it has 233 megahertz judging by the model name. But like I said, I don't really know for sure what's in here. This was literally just dropped off with me. My friend, Billy Coore, got a really awesome load of computers over in Tennessee. And as he was driving on the way back, he handed this and some other stuff off with me and freed up a little bit of room in his car. But yeah, thank you very much to Billy for that. And I was not familiar with this particular body case style of Gateway. In

fact, I don't even know how... [panel snaps] Okay! Well... All right, there's – so it's a G6-233M. Interesting, but yeah, I guess that's how that comes off. It's not hinged how I thought, but yeah, I was not familiar with this exact style of tower case from them. And in case you're not aware, the Gateway 2000 company released all sorts of slightly better-spec-than-usual PCs. In fact, they had some pretty high-end stuff too. So it was always kind of a step up from your Packard Bells and whatnot.

I've collected and had a bunch of them over the years of restored one on LGR in the past that I actually sent over to Ian of Brutalmoose and he uses that, I think, still as his Windows 98 or I think it's an XP machine now. But yeah, this is an older version of that type of thing. I think in terms of this being like one of the the consumer or "home multimedia" models, but I don't know for sure. I find it too amusing that it has this power button operation sticker still on there. Probably cuz it

was confusing, and they chose to leave it on. "Power Management Enabled" has all these things happening and your system status changes, depending on how long you press it, and holding it in in five seconds or not, or green, amber, different LEDs. It also does reset with that button as well? Oh my goodness. It just seems like a bit silly to do all that with one button. Why not just put more buttons? Eh! So yeah, I'm going to look this up real quick and see maybe how much it cost, what exactly mig

ht be in here. All right, so this came up pretty quickly actually. It was a bunch of results. They usually are 'cause they edited – "edited?" *Advertised* pretty frequently back in the day. Gateway did. It's a July 10th, 1997 issue of PC Magazine, "Gutsy Systems." This is the G6-266 XL. This is more of the case style that I was more familiar with for this generation of them. But I guess by late 1997, they came up with this more rounded, bulbous case design, which I do not like as much, but it's

fine. It's the specs that count, so the G6-233M, $2,649 in 1997. So, that much adjusted for inflation in the current year. My goodness, not cheap, but the lowest-end of their G Series Multimedia Systems. Of course, they also had G Series Professional. And Destination, they also had like the E-Series and the NS, and I think the P or something. I don't know. They had a bunch of different things. The "multimedia" ones were just the home computers for doing multimedia. 233 megahertz, Pentium II, 32

megs of RAM. It would've come with a monitor at one point. STB Virge GX 4-megabyte graphics, PCI graphics. 3.2 gig hard drive, 16 speed max CD-ROM, 3.5-inch drive. They added the CD-RW to this one, whoever had it last. Ensoniq wavetable card, that'd be cool. Telepath modem. They do call this a mid-tower case. It's a pretty big case, but compared to the full tower cases, yeah, this was actually pretty mid. It came with some software and stuff. I don't know. This doesn't have that. In fact, I don'

t even know if the hard drive's in there. I don't know if the stuff is still installed in there, but we're gonna find out. Let's go ahead and turn it around, see what's inside, sort of, and then open it up. Yeah, I don't know, see what kind of condition it's in, and hopefully get this thing going. [brief jazzy interlude as PC is rotated] Well, least I know it has some good rubber feet on there. That thing is not going anywhere. So up top here, we have a power supply. I'd be surprised if it was a

ny more than a couple hundred watts. Got an area for a cooling fan that I've actually never seen one installed in one of these cases. It's always covered up with more metal. But yeah, PS/2 ports for keyboard and mouse. Two, presumably, USB 1.1 ports there, parallel, two COM ports for serial. No integrated sound, which is interesting. It is a separate sound card of some kind there. Got a blank here. Who knows what's been done to this? In fact, this, yeah, video card is not fully in there. We do h

ave ethernet that's been added to it at some point. There is our good old Telepath modem from Gateway. A couple of changes have happened at some point. [unsponsored screwdriver unscrewing] [side panel clunking around] Let's get some light here... Cool. Well, yeah, nice little Slow 1 Pentium 2 right there. It's looking as it should. Delightful looking capacitors. Jiggly GPU. Let's see what this is. A fair amount of RAM, whatever's going on. Well, I might have to, I'm gonna have to look this up. W

ell, it's got a Dell part number, and that comes up as an Nvidia TNT2 AGP card with 32 megs of RAM. That is a significant upgrade to the four megabyte thing it probably originally had. See what we got going on with this RAM because we only got one stick here. It is a single Crucial module with 128 megs. Again an upgrade, so whoever had this thing, yeah, upgraded the RAM, the video, added ethernet, CD-RW. Who knows what else? What is this hard disk? MPF310AT. It's a Fujitsu, 10 gig. Okay, so agai

n, seemingly an upgrade. I think I, what did that say? It had four or six or something originally. No doubt that the little CR2032 will need to be replaced if it hasn't been already. I don't know. Like if somebody was upgrading this, maybe they really kept it in good shape. This power supply, it is a Newton power. Yeah, 200 watts. I was pretty dead-on there, but that's usually what these have, so whatever. Don't know if the floppy drive and the CD-ROM are original, but yeah, they're not even hoo

ked up like the hard drive. None of the drives are hooked up, except maybe the 3.5-inch floppy. Nice though that this board has AGP, four PCI, and two 16-bit ISA slots. That is pretty handy. One of 'em taken up with this modem. Who cares though? We'll probably take that out. Our sound card here we have and, yeah it's an Ensoniq. Yes, 1370 AudioPCI. Don't know if I've ever used one of these exactly. I probably have on another Gateway, but certainly not something I've used very often if so. Oof, t

hat was in there tightly. So here is our extremely generic ethernet card. Farallon, never heard of that, but we got a cheap, little Realtek RTL8029AS chip there. So it is just the most basic. It does LAN. Get our delightful GPU back in there and hook things up again and yeah, we'll see if it just powers on. I don't know, this was probably connected to the hard disk. I don't wanna plug those in yet. I just wanna power it on first and then we'll see about the drives. [jazz music concludes] [PC bri

efly powering on, then off] [concerned chuckle] It ain't working. It's not staying on. It turns right off. Power cycling and making the fan do stuff, but... It's like I'm having to cold start it... Oh, wait. Staying on now. Oh hey, we got a video signal. All right, well I don't know what's up with that power on. It didn't say anything about having to hold it in or press it multiple times, but anyway, so far, so good. Pentium II 233, 128 megs of RAM. I'm sure we've got a dead battery. [PC beeping

] Yep. All right, so far, so standard. And got a nice little BIOS here. We'll get a new battery here in a moment. Like I said, nothing's plugged in, except for, I think, the floppy drive and that's it. So it's not gonna detect anything. All right, well let me go ahead and get the battery replaced real quick. See if it turns off easily. Yep. Nope, nope, it restarted. All right, well that's a little wonky. You do have to hold it five seconds. The reset is just powering it off and then powering bac

k on again. I misread that. I still don't know why it's being weird with power on. Anyway, let's fix this dang battery and get the crap plugged in and nerp-ah-derr. [battery snaps out, clicks in] This drive's all plugged in. I think all of the jumpers are in the right location. We'll see. And since we're in here, I'm gonna go ahead and replace or look at the thermal paste/pad situation on our Slot 1. And typically, with these, you just push these little tabs all the way in like that, and they'll

just slide out. But this one I noticed has one of these extra, little bits under here And that's just all that needs. There we go. That should slide out with no effort. I mentioned that because I've had some trouble with this design before, and I didn't realize that there's also sometimes little things you gotta push in on the side there, but not on this one. There we go. Our lovely Pentium II 233, Slot 1 deal. And there's no fan, just this big old beefy heat sink which we will need to remove t

o get to the inside. Slightly annoying little screws on there, but should have some of those. Well, maybe this isn't one where you have to take the heatsink off. I sure hope not cuz man, it's like they torqued those things in there so hard the heads are warped a little bit on the top of the screw there, the bolt, or whatever. [heat sink thuds] Ah! I feel like I'm gonna break it if I pull any harder or any, I mean, I've gone all the way across this edge here. Certain models of these just split ap

art with the plastic there and this just, it comes off quite easily. And just outta curiosity, I did look it up and found a video of this guy just brutalizing this poor Pentium 2 here and eventually, he was able to get in, but it was like three minutes of just chopping away at the plastic. Eventually, it gets in there by just snapping off a piece of it or, I don't know. It is not something I wanna do to mine is what I'm saying. It's possible, but you know what? I'm just gonna leave it as is for

now. I can add a fan if needed. These Pentium 2s don't run extremely hot. We should be okay, but you know. [clips snapping into place] [GPU clunking down] We do have a blank spot there. Lemme get a cover for that. [relaxing jazzy music] [plastic lid snaps] [screwdriver screwing] Yeah, it makes me feel better at least. [hard disk whirring] All right, that is a noisy hard disk. [PC beeps twice with concern] I know! [keyboard typing sounds] So anyway, it detected that, and it detected the Toshiba C

D-ROM. There's nothing detected from, whatever the other one is, that HP burner. Okay, we've got power. It opens up. Cable Select is what the jumper is on, IDE cables in the right spot for pin one. It should be okay. I'm going to move that cable select 'cause that can be a little odd. It's a pain in the dick to get to though. Yeah, it's all the way in there. It's annoying or whatever. It's fine. Aha, there we go. Yeah, so that was all I needed was the jumper change. Yay. All right, so we have it

set to, yeah, we're just gonna try and boot from the hard disk, see if there's anything on there. DOS 6.22 boot disk right here. Let's see if that works. If we see anything here. Well, I don't know. [keyboard clacking] Eh, it, yeah, it's not even, I would assume there's not even a partition... Yeah, nothing. If this checks out, I'm going to see about using one of these recovery discs on archive.org. I'm just gonna try this one, 5.5. It seems to be an early 1998 one. And lo and behold, somebody

else mentioned using it to restore a G6-233M, so hopefully that'll do the trick. I don't know if we actually need to format this first, or if the restoration media will just do that. I'm assuming it will, but it can't hurt, right? I'm gonna grab me some more coffee and burn that CD, come back in a bit. Hmm, well, I said it to try and boot from the CD and didn't seem to wanna do that. So I guess it's going on the floppy disk. Oh, it just doesn't wanna read it. Oh, it's getting there. Wow. It's ju

st really being wonky, huh? [suddenly southern] Do we just got a dirty drive?! [CD tray noisily closes] Maybe that's why they added a second drive and just didn't replace the original, 'cause it does have a kind of a custom bezel on the front, but you should just be able to replace that and swap the bezel out... Well that right straight away. So I'm assuming we just got a wonky drive with that first one. There we go. That's what I was hoping for. All right. So yeah, for sure. We just got a bad d

rive. You know, the OG one up there at the top. So, it's a prime candidate for cleaning and maybe swapping. Gateway System Restoration program! Well, it said it was ready to go and now it does not detect the CD in either drive. I don't know. It was working just fine. It's trying to maybe load from the top or the, you know, the original CD drive. Which is the one that doesn't work, so that could be an issue. I'm just gonna go ahead and replace that drive. [slightly upbeat jazz tunes] [various dis

assembly sounds] I mean it might clean up and work just fine, but lemme see what else I got. Yeah, I was thinking, maybe one of these. It is a Toshiba from October '98. Pretty darn similar. [pleased chuckle] All right! This was tested working last time I tried it, so. Just gonna leave the bezel for now and do a quick test, see if this fares any better. [CD tray whirring loudly] Nah, this one's worse. [laughing] [CD tray whirs again] It won't even keep a disc in the drive. [please put it out of i

ts misery] Okay, starting over on that end, I got a random other 50 something speed drive going there just to test that. And, while we're waiting, gonna go ahead and clean this cuz my goodness, it sure is dusty. That could be all it is. [compressed air blowing] [white lithium grease can shaking] Cleaned and lubed what needs to be, so fingers crossed. All right, we're getting somewhere with that no-name drive, so that's good. I did notice that when it started working though, it also started askin

g for the OS CD-ROM, which is not the recovery one, but I couldn't even get past that point 'cause it wasn't reading anything. Anyway, I just put in a random Windows 95 CD. [entering very legit serial number] All right. The plan at this point is to get it installed, hopefully. Okay, and the CD-ROM there, we know that works. And then we'll try this one again. Well, this is different. We got the AudioStation 2, a Voyetra thing going. So I guess this is some Gateway shenanigans. Oh, all right. We'r

e just into Windows. Yeah, install that too. Just install all the things! [CD-ROM whirs loudly] Wow, that CD-ROM drive is horribly loud. [laughing] 56 speed. [CD-ROM whirring extremely loud and fast] Definitely wanna replace that if we can. Well, good news and bad news. The good news, Windows 95 installed. It's got stuff put on here that it wanted to put on here, like this gateway.net internet connection, which we're not gonna be able to do anything with, of course. And there some other stuff li

ke the Voyetra AudioStation things, just your classic kind of sound and audio playback stack from Voyetra. Gateway branded, which is nice. But this brings us to the problem and no, that problem is not McAfee VirusScan, even though it did install that as well. Now, what I mean is the sound. It doesn't work. Like we get... [noisy popping, crackling] Popping and noise, and clicking, and that's it! And it did install it, apparently, it's actually a "Creative Labs Ensoniq" device. I don't know. Anywa

y, showed up as a Sound Blaster Audio PCI 64V. Yeah this, I've tried each of these modes, all of these are the same, no matter what. I have IRQs free and stuff. I even changed around the settings for certain things and tried it in DOS, uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers, and tried some different ones. That didn't work either. What's weird is I kind of heard the sound was trying to come through at first, but just kind of noise was on top of it and now there's nothing but popping. So I don't

know, I'm kind of tempted to simply start from scratch, like a fresh Windows 95 install, none of the Gateway stuff. And then just install individual drivers that maybe work a little better, perhaps. Maybe, I don't know, cuz like the Nvidia card, I already had to put some separate drivers on there. It didn't even come with any special wallpapers. I put this on here myself. I have options, but I kind of don't wanna do any of them. [laugh of laziness] You know, it's like, do I take this card out an

d replace it with something that I know for sure is good? Do I just take this card in another and put that in another system and test it there? Or just restart from scratch, you know, or go with a completely fresh Windows 95 install? Don't even mess with any of that Gateway stuff. And then add the drivers on my own. They're, you know, I have usually good luck with these Gateway Restore CDs, but the fact that this one is not finding everything exactly, like the USB stuff in particular, and the mo

dem should be on there too. It's just, it, there's weird stuff, right? So, don't know what I'm gonna do yet. [indecisive sigh] Let's see if that CD-ROM works. [static crackling over Windows 95 startup] Yeah, that that's what I was doing earlier. Interesting. So I turn it off and it kind of comes back. [CD tray whirring] Hey, all right. Not that we'll have any sound, but we can install the MMX variant of Pod. Since this is an MMX machine, we have the support for that optional version. Nice. All r

ight, well, I guess the original CD-ROM drive is going. So that's one thing taken care of. It really is just coming down to the sound now, and I'd like to get the USB going. Just outta curiosity, I grabbed and tried a third set of drivers. [odd busted noises play] I swear it does something different with every set of drivers. Ahh... kinda wanna just wipe everything and start over, you know? On the road again! The formatting and doing that stuff. I also took out the modem and the ethernet 'cause

we don't need 'em. Just put the sound card in a different slot. See what happens now. Well, what happened is it's the next day! I was up till 10:00 PM last night working on this and getting everything all sorted. And eventually I did. For the most part, it is a complete success with Windows. It is running, performing, working so much better, fully stable now. I was running into some stability issues as well. I don't know if I showed those earlier, but yeah, I ended up swapping out the RAM becaus

e it was wonky, and that 128-megabyte module, I dunno where it came from. So I just put another known working module in there and all those crashing stability issues went away, so yeah, that's cool. Added a couple little customization bits in here 'cause it felt like it and it actually has the proper Ensoniq drivers, not the later ones from when Creative took over. So you have all this in here. You have different MIDI versions of the waveset you can mess around with if you want. You can add more

if you want to do that. Yeah, I mean it's pretty much what we had earlier, except now, it's actually working without any weird corrupted sound. [Windows "Ding!" sound playing clearly] Really, as soon as I put those drivers in here with this fresh Windows OSR 2.5 install, it just worked straight away. I haven't had any weird issues at all with sound. And I got the USB going also, which turned out to be easier than I thought because inside there, we actually have a nice OEM variant of Intel's SE4

40BX motherboard, it turns out. Which is very easy to find proper updated drivers for. Well, as updated as they get anyway. It's a very well-regarded board, so I was happy to see that's what we have. The only problem is the optical drive situation because they both shat themselves in different ways. Truly unfortunate because this one that I cleaned up, it was working fantastically. That's how I installed all the Windows and the software and the drivers, everything. But yeah, [gear whirring freel

y] the gear broke for the ejecting mechanism, so it just slides freely now. [CD tray thuds] Yeah, it reads perfectly fine. It was performing great, but yeah, I might have to try and find a gear replacement or 3D print that or something. [CD tray whirring] And then you'll notice the CD-RW is no longer in there. I put this 56 speed one, the incredibly loud, annoying, noisy one just for now, until I find another replacement. But yeah, the CD-RW that, it just died in a way I haven't seen. Lemme show

you. Yeah it just, straight up, does not get any power at all anymore. It was showing a red light and then it just turned off and yeah, nothing is happening, no matter which connector I plug it into. And just to be sure, we are getting five volts there, 12 volts there. All the connectors that I've tested work just fine. Just some wonky stuff. Terrible luck with these optical drives. But I'm gonna put this thing on below the desk, so it's not frigging loud with the CDs going. And let's try some

software games, and we're gonna start with Ubisoft's "POD." Now, this particular version of the game is retail, just regular 2.0. Don't have any patches applied to get Direct3D acceleration going, but it will run in software mode just fine, so. - [Game Voiceover] Five, four, three, two, one, go! [car engines revving] [keyboard clacking] - Yeah, even without full Direct3D or anything, I think it still looks pretty darn good for what it is. Certainly in a nostalgically accurate kind of sense becau

se yeah, when I first played this back in the day, it was on my Acer Aspire with a 233 megahertz, AMD K6 CPU and no 3D acceleration. So it looked just like this and performed not too far off from this. So yeah, to me, like this is just what "POD" looks like. I'm so used to it that whenever I do run it in full, like, you know, Glide 3Dfx mode or Direct3D or anything, it kind of seems too crisp and I don't know, software mode "POD", it works. [car engines revving] [keyboard clacking] Strictly thro

ugh rose-tinted glasses, but also just, I don't know, aesthetic level, I think it kind of fits the whole theme of weirdness and eh, it's just one of those games that it looks good in software mode in my completely biased opinion. All right, it works just how you'd hope. You have to install a patch tag, a Direct3D going with this version and this video card going though - [Game Voiceover] Welcome to Westwood. - Yeah, another set of lovely memories for me on that particular machine: Command and Co

nquer: Red Alert! [keyboard clacking] [logo and metal doors whirring] [Red Alert logo pulsing] [chopper rotors whirring] [tank engine revving] - [Game Voiceover] "Mission timer initialized." -"Reinforcements have arrived." - [Infantry] Yes sir? - All right, let's get you down here and build a base. - [Game Voiceover] New construction options. - [Infantry] Reporting, affirmative. - Affirmative. - [Infantry] Affirmative Affirmative. Very well. [machine gun blasting] Of course. [things exploding] A

greed. Very well. - [Game Voiceover] Reinforcements have arrived. - Heck yeah. Gimme more dudes, I'll take more dudes! - [Game Voiceover] Reinforcements have arrived. New construction options. Building. - [Infantry] Reporting. - Don't if I need a barracks. I keep getting reinforcements. - [Infantry] Yes, sir? - What the heck? - [Infantry] Reporting. Acknowledged. [dog whimpering] - Sorry, dog. - [Infantry] Affirmative. Reporting. - [Game Voiceover] Our base is under attack. [machine gun blasting

] [infantry grunting] [grunting] - [Infantry] Agreed. - I love every sound in this game [chuckling] and the music which... [machine gun blasting] - [Infantry] Yes, sir? - I would be cranking up if it weren't likely to get copyright struck. - [Game Voiceover] Units lost. - Okay, well you know what? - [Game Voiceover] Units lost. Units lost. [machine guns firing] - Rocket man. It's up to you. [machine guns continue] - [Game Voiceover] Unit lost. [infantry grunting] - [Infantry] Yes, sir? - [Game V

oiceover] Unit lost. - Oh no, the dog ate the rocket man. Well, you know what, that's probably deserved. Okay, well anyways, game is fun. - [Game Voiceover] Battle control, terminated. - I really wanna keep playing that, but we gotta try something else. We're gonna go with something from 1999. [engine revving sound plays] Need For Speed: High Stakes. And I got this set as "Direct3D Device 1," which will show off some of that 3D acceleration, which we haven't actually seen yet. - [Game Intro] "El

ectronic Arts!" - Yeah. [menu music beings playing, then stuttering] Well, that's a problem. Yeah, just never know what's gonna happen. Worked perfectly fine last night. [music plays, stutters, PC freezes] [aimless mouse and keyboard clicking] ...you know?... All right, time has passed. I've uninstalled and reinstalled it a couple of times. Changed some drive settings, some graphic settings. It still freezes. Tried "Need for Speed III," same exact issue. And that's interesting, even though it wa

s working last night and that's doubly confusing. So I went and changed around the graphics drivers, put some new ones in there. Also changed around DirectX versions, which that's about the only thing that was different from last night that I can think of. And that was DirectX. I had five or six, and it's got seven after I put some more games after testing. Anyway, let's see if "Midtown Madness 2" does anything. So hardware 3D is selected, let's turn on some stuff. Right... ...This just froze as

well. The somewhat odd thing is it can run stuff in software mode perfectly fine. Like "POD" and "Red Alert." "Half-life" even works in OpenGL. It just seems to be Direct3D. What's driving me nuts is that I was playing Direct3D accelerated stuff yesterday without a hitch. So yeah, OpenGL, 640x480. 3D acceleration, let's get that going. - [Scientist] "I've just been informed that the sample is ready, Gordon. It should be coming up to you anytime. Look to the delivery system for your specimen." -

So yeah, this is what I was playing last night. It's running... [laser crackling] [game gets quite loud] - Oh my, gooood. - Very loudly. [building exploding] But yeah, running just fine. Of course, so were the other games, so I don't know. And the fact that, I mean you know, we can do 3D acceleration and whatnot. Just not Direct3D. That's the weird part. So, yeah. [elevator exploding] [scientist screaming, Clint ignoring] Yeah, it does seem to be performing a little less good than I would expec

t for a 32-megabyte whenever this is, Riva TNT2 or something. Oh crap... Uh yeah, something like that. Now, I had a TNT2 Vanta LT 16 meg card back in the day. That was really quite bad, but that was on a – dang it. That was on a much faster system than this. [Glock blasting] [zombie grunting] [gunfire] [panel exploding] [headcrab attacks] [pistol shooting] [gun clicking] I deserve to die. [laughing] Anyway, OpenGL works perfectly fine is my point. And also Half-life is awesome, but that's alway

s been the case. Yeah, like what is up with this bizarre Direct3D, DirectX problem? So software rendering we expect to be fine because it has been... And now hardware acceleration... It worked there for like a second. But see the thing is it tends to be like going on for a while. Let's try that again... ...I just don't know. Quake should be fine, right? Yep. So far so good anyway. Don't have mouse turned on, but that's fine. [character grunt-jumping] [gunfire commences] [soldier grunting] Nineti

es computers, man, it especially gets wonky when you're like on that edge between something from '96, '97, then moving on to like '98, '99, 2000. [guns firing] [soldier grunting] I don't know, that's why these can be such an interesting, frustrating, rewarding type of experience honestly. Cuz you just don't know what's gonna happen. SimCity 3000 Unlimited. We'll see if that still works. It was last night, but that don't mean crap these days! [calm music] Let's just do Craterville. Not the bigges

t of cities, but we're at a Pentium 2. [whistling] All right. A standard experience loading on a, you know, system of this class. [calm jazzy music] Once it gets all loaded in the memory though, it's usually fine, you know, ish. [calm jazzy music continues] There we go. Yeah, honestly that, not too far off from what I remember of my Acer Aspire, again, with a 233 megahertz K6. So yeah, fully playable, it just takes a second to get into it and get stuff loaded and whatever. [calm jazzy music cont

inues] [humming] [calm jazzy music continues] Definitely gets more sluggish when you crank up the speed. But you know, this is how I played it more or less back in the day. So eh, it's kind of more laid back experience, right? So it's not the worst. You got used to it, for sure, back then. Like I said, once things are all loaded in and whatnot, it seems to perform just fine for what it is. The more things change or the faster you run it, obviously, that slows things down quite a bit. But... yeah

, you know. Not bad. I'm still just really confused about the whole Direct3D thing, but I'm sure there's a solution. All right. Couldn't put it down. So it's another hour or two later and yeah, I just straight up swapped the GPU after also trying a patch for "High Stakes" and seeing if that did anything. Nope. Also tried another version of DirectX. Nope. Tried another version of the Nvidia drivers. Nope. So I put a GeForce 2 MX400 in here, a 64-megabyte AGP card. And yeah! It's now working with

Need For Speed III and 4, and presumably "Midtown Madness 2," and whatever else wasn't working. [car engines revving] Yeah, I guess we just had some issues here with whatever this Riva card TNT2 piece of crap was. - [Game Announcer] Two, one, go! [tires screeching] - And speaking of which, it's running exactly the same as that card was. So I'm assuming we're limited just in other ways, pretty much as you'd expect for being a Pentium 2 system. But I mean, we've got plenty of RAM in here now, 256

megs, a 64-megabyte AGP GPU, but you know, we've got the bus speed of, what is this, 66 megahertz, I think? So yeah, I mean, it's really not ideal for late 90s kind of things at all, but that's fine. That's just how it is. This is a 640x480, by the way. But yeah, I'm just glad that we got it working again. I still don't know what's up with this. I gotta test it in another system now and see, what the heck? About the only other thing I wanna test before we do any kind of cleaning is a little bit

of DOS here. So the PC speaker, which it does have, technically. [PC speaker beeping] A little piezoelectric beeper that's not very loud. [PC speaker sounds beeping away] Hey, at least it's there. Yeah, I just like it loud. [chuckles at quiet piezo beeper] So FM synthesizer though, this is a bit of a... [weird Keen 4 music plays] Yeah... It sounds wrong. [warbly, off-key sounds playing] In like every way. The wrong pitch, the wrong sound, ugh, just everything. [continued odd sounds] I mean AdLib

is often wonky emulated on these earlier kind of sound cards, or PCI sound cards like this, but... That's one of the weirder ones. But we also have some nice Sound Blaster compatibility for the Pro 2.0, and all the settings that you would prefer it to be. As well as a General MIDI implementation with wavetable. [GRABBAG theme plays] Eh, it's not bad. But there is another option. I know it's all flickery here, just gimme a sec. Yeah, you have two and four megabytes that it comes with, and there'

s also some others you can download and add to it, but... [GRABBAG plays with pitiful drums] [laughing] Well! I don't know about "better," but it's certainly different. Hmm. - [Duke] "Come get some!" - Those drums are rather tinny sounding on this particular sound set. [pistol firing, alien dying] And what is that synth?! [laughs at the wonkiness] [mimicking wonky synth music] Okay, that is quite the choice for that instrument. I don't know, it's kind of charming. [RPGs exploding] Can't hit anyt

hing. Ugh. [Duke explodes himself] At least we have a goofy synthesizer to keep us company. I should probably go ahead and start cleaning, but eh, there's "Hover" on here. I can't say no to this. Yeah, give me that blue flag. [power-up whirring] Aha! Nice. [victorious music] All right, now, let's go and clean this thing. So dirty. [clean jazz music plays over timelapse] -Nice. -Yeah, it wasn't quite as dirty as I thought it might be. Just your normal assortment of years of built-up dust and dirt

and grime, especially in the corners and the crevices, but otherwise really not too bad. It was primarily these two side panels that had the most scuffs and there's still some scrapes, but I'm really happy that it's not unevenly yellowed or something as these are prone to do. But yeah, another thing that I did last night is actually got the original CD-ROM drive working again. So yeah, I just went ahead and took everything apart and realized thankfully that the gear didn't actually break. It ju

st completely came off. It's a little thing about yay big, you know, like the size of a frozen pea, a little white gear. And it controls everything, pretty much, in the bottom left corner area there. And without that, it just, eject doesn't happen and everything gets screwed up. I also had a very similar problem with this. Remember this one would just eject and go back, and eject, and go. It just wouldn't do anything other than that. It was basically the same thing inside, much cheaper construct

ion, a lot more plastic parts. It had like half plastic rails instead of metal ones, for instance. But yeah, the eject is working now. I haven't actually tested reading, but I'm assuming it's fine with it being all cleaned up. The laser cleaned and rails re-lubed and all that. So anyway, let's get this put back together. [jazz tunes continue] [swift screwing] Crap, why don't I put the side on first? That was a... tsk! [screwdriver unscrews] You gotta be kidding! I think the sides need to go on l

ast. [unscrewing yet again] [panel thuds] [screwdriver screws moar] [sighing] Son of a [beep-bleep-beeeep] [front panel closes] Whew! All right. A rather silly series of flubs there. But anyway, I think it's looking rather fantastic. Yeah, I mean it looked pretty good as it was, but it is even better now. That's kind of bulbous design really hasn't grown on me too much over the course of working on it this week, this two day project that turned into five days. But, yeah, cleans up well for sure,

right? And you know, these sort of rounded OEM slightly bulbous machines from companies, like Gateway and Acer, and whatnot back in the late 90s were certainly of the late 90s, very much of their time. I wish that door was hinged... But whatever, we've got a pretty nice Pentium II 233 megahertz MMX machine, with a sound card that isn't great. I will probably swap that out at some point if I really feel like it. I don't know, might as well just keep it original. Besides, sometimes an old PC does

n't need to be perfect. [Windows 95 startup sound plays] Sometimes it's just fine being present, acting as a nice representation of a fleeting moment in computing history. The kind of system that didn't set any records, but nonetheless acted as many people's first system to go online, or their computer that played their favorite game. The machine someone used to make printed greeting cards to brighten someone else's day. And I think this type of Gateway 2000 desktop represents that fully. I stil

l love my expensive old PC unicorns, but I have an increasing appreciation for computers like this that scream "average." So I'm fine with this G6-233M not having the perfect sound card or the ideal GPU, or the fastest processor, or whatever. In a way, I'd like to revert it even closer to what it originally had from the factory with less RAM and a simpler video card going on. But eh, we'll see. For now though, I'm enjoying it, and I hope you enjoyed seeing it come together and get cleaned up. I

rarely do these type of videos, since I inevitably end up convincing myself they're boring. But I hope that wasn't the case for you. And if you're still watching, then I'll assume as much. And if you do like this type of thing, then check out my previous restorations. Or stick around, new LGR things are continually in the works. And as always, thanks for watching1