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,

assuming 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 might 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 any 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 have 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.

Well, 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 again, 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 hooked 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, that 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 briefly 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 back 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 to 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 apart

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 CD-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 just 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 drive.

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 disassembly 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 its 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 asking 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're 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

like 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. Anyway,

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.