Checking out some early 2000s systems. They were running a radio station!

don't worry you're not seeing triple and there's no need to adjust your YouTube machines it's time to see what's up with these clone systems all these cases are branded Venus which I'm guessing is just the manufacturer of the case I see some other similarities that make me think these must have come from the same place so let's tear into these find out what's inside and see if there's any common threads between them let's get started with this machine not a whole lot going on in the front see we have an LG cdrw drive there got a regular old three and a half inch floppy drive and some parts of this face plate are more yellowed than others like this drive blank here and got our power and reset switches okay now things are getting interesting this device connected to the parallel port is called a sentinel key and that's actually a hardware license key for a piece of software very curious to know what that's all about so hopefully that hard drive works and there's something interesting down here got two RCA jacks and four quarter inch jacks on that card I am very curious to know what that's all about and we have some kind of video card got vgas video and composite outputs and got a Nick aha a clue don't know what that string is all about but looks like they might have some kind of 800 megahertz AMD 512 Megs Ram Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 and a 60 gigabyte Max tour Drive let's see if any of that is true and so far these are the only two screws I can see that are involved with opening the case so I'm guessing this top panel slides off then that allows us to pull the side panels off let's see okay let's get those screws out of there now does this slide yep it slides let's pull that off okay we've got a little grab handle up here so yeah there we go that was actually pretty easy I'm starting to like this case Hmm got some more clues down here looks like the motherboard battery was replaced in 2006 and apparently this machine was rebuilt in 2006. it's interesting that these stickers are marked radio resources maybe these machines came from a radio station that would explain that strange audio card and boy this thing is incredibly clean inside there is very minimal dust buildup and we do have a hard drive let's hope that works okay I have got to start with that audio card okay well that's not telling me very much it has a xilinx fpga chip so that could be anything we do have some branding here digital audio Labs Incorporated got a PCB number here let's see what's on the back yeah no info on the back either well just judging by all the ports it has it's definitely a digital audio recording slash mixing card well that's gonna be fun to play with let's put that to the side now let's check out that video card no explicit Clues on the front but judging by that MX2 badge I'm guessing it's an Nvidia card that is a pretty heat sink though love that blue and indeed it is an Nvidia mx400 got 64 Megs of vram very nice now let's check out that Nick [Music] yeah this is three com 10 100 Nick looks like it's got a little Port here possibly for the Wake on land connection from 1999 yeah everything in this system is pretty reasonably clean it's just a very light covering of dust got zip ties everywhere now let's get everything disconnected and there's our motherboard on full display it's a gigabyte ga-7 ZX dual bios board it has AGP PCI and Isa very nice now let's get at that CPU geez that thing was barely hanging on there I can clearly see why too looks like that heatsink attachment lug is broken or at least there's not very much left of it that could be a problem but the heatsink itself is actually pretty nice looks like it has a copper Block in the middle and it's actually got some pretty good weight to it all right let's pull that CPU out of there kind of hard to see with all that Parish thermal paste on it but it is an AMD Duron looks like 800 megahertz all good on the pins just a little bit Dusty all right let's check out that Ram and we do indeed have 512 Megs of ram that edge connector is pretty dirty I'm gonna have to clean that up but the rest of it's pretty clean now let's get that drive cage out of there looks like we have a single screw in the front here and I'm guessing this is a release tab let's see how that goes yeah there we go now let's get that front panel disconnected now let's get that motherboard out yeah that CPU socket looks like it's been through a war it's not a problem for holding the heat sink on but there is a bigger problem we've got a shattered capacitor here and it is going to be impossible for me to find a value for that now I'm going to presume that the motherboard Works without it obviously that's complete speculation but if it has stability problems that's going to be my first suspect I'm actually tempted to just go ahead and remove it okay yeah I just went ahead and desoldered the remnants of that capacitor I'll see if the board can run without it if it has problems I'll take a shot in a dark and try replacing it with just a random capacitor and the CMOS battery has a charge but it is low so let's go ahead and replace it and there's our sound chip it's a creative ct5880 Dash dcq Okay so this heatsink is actually really clean but this fan sounds terrible yeah that thing sounds awful let's see if we can help it and as usual cut into the label to get at the bearing and drip some three in one oil in there I'll run the fan to let the oil work into the bearing now some IPA cleanup and some Captain tape seal up okay well that's a little better it's still an unreasonably loud fan on its own though now let's clean up that thermal paste [Music] there we go and here's that floppy drive it's a Sony mpf-920z made in March 2002 and in contrast to the rest of the system we're actually pretty dusty in here now let's clean those heads well they were minimally dirty now let's clean and grease that lead screw and here's the hard drive you can see it's not a Max tour instead we have a 60 gig Western Digital Caviar manufactured October 2002 and there's another one of those radio resource stickers let's wipe that dust off and here's that CD burner manufactured by HL data storage which is a joint venture between Hitachi and LG from April 2005. so I am really starting to love this case these top rails here are actually rolled over that makes it really comfortable when you're grabbing it to pick it up here there's no sharp metal Edge to slice your hand open and it's got this little plastic bumper here protecting you from this sharp edge I sure wish all case manufacturers were this thoughtful all right that power supply is marked as being from 2006. so there's a good chance it's okay but let's see got the Everlasting sacrificial hard drives connected as a dummy load let's see how it goes all right 12 and 5 volt rails are doing fine fan sounds good we'll give that five minutes all right five minutes is up no change so I think we're good now let's get some fresh thermal paste on that CPU now let's see how well this heatsink reinstallation goes with that broken lug okay well at least it stays on there this should be fine okay now let's get this face plate off it's just held in with screws and some reasonably accessible clips yeah not the cleanest thing in the world back here won't be too hard to clean up though all right the back side's cleaned up now I'm just going to go over the front side with the Magic Eraser and some Windex all right well that's as clean as that's going to get and it didn't turn out too bad okay we're back together let's see what this thing does oh that thing's noisy really noisy but it is posting yeah that hard drive is making way more noise than it should I'm kind of doubting that it works all right got a CMOS error no surprise let's just continue for now oh but it is trying to boot see how far it gets and it does have Windows 2000 on it I'm gonna have to put those side covers back on because that thing is just incredibly noisy and that hard drive's no good and that sucks because I really wanted to see what this thing had on it well since the drive did read initially I'm not convinced that it's completely dead so let's see if it'll live long enough to take an image [Music] it does sound absolutely terrible but it did initialize okay let's see if it got assigned a block device and it did it got assigned sdb so let's make sure and yep that's an NTFS partition well let's just see if we can take an image we use the DD command set our input device to sdb output to a file we use one kilobyte sectors so for this run I do want to let it stop on i o errors so let's just give us a nice little status indicator see how that goes okay well it's copying incredibly slowly but it is copying let's see how far we get if this works I'll just take that image and clone it onto a good hard drive alright surprisingly the image process completed with no errors gotta love that look alright let's go ahead and mount that image and make sure it's okay but before we can do that we got to figure out what the offset is and that's really easy to find out you just take this uh start number and multiply it by the bytes per sector so let's go ahead and mount it we'll use the loop option then we'll specify the offset and that comes to three two two five six type is NTFS point it to our image file and then give it a mountain point all right looks good let's see and yep got some data all right so that image file should be fine so let's go ahead and write it to a good hard drive I'm just going to go ahead and write it to this hundred gig Western Digital Caviar the size difference doesn't matter as long as it's bigger than the image file let's just make sure it got assigned stb and it did so now I just have to do the reverse process take input from the image file and then output to slash Dev slash sdb and give us a nice progress indicator and now we wait some more all right that finished up let's just make sure we can mount it and yep mounts right up all right let's get it back in the machine then let's see how far we get now all right that's looking better oh no I can't mount my w Drive do not try to restore the connection in the future yeah let's not do that right now okay that card Deluxe software was the whole reason I restored this drive so let's see this looks interesting oh they never registered it all right let's see what we have on here Cool Edit Pro yeah we got some professional audio stuff going on here let's open that up let's see if we can take input from that sound Deluxe card okay well it's taking input from something let's see stop devices okay yeah that's set as our recording device okay it doesn't have a super low noise floor okay well at least it does something let's close that out no to all let's see sound Forge I wonder if that's what the Sentinel key is for try to record in here can't select the card Deluxe device okay well never mind let's close out of this see what else is on here see what creative software we have creative wave Studio there's all kinds of audio goodies on this thing see what's Scott Studios Corporation trim label and convert oh okay this must be what that Sentinel key is for okay now this is interesting this must be what they're using to play their commercials see if we can play one of these okay I guess not I wonder where these are located let's see let's search start.wave so they're an audio slash 101. let's try to play one of these okay not much happening there let's open it up in Cool Edit Pro okay got static there let's try opening it in something else Windows Media Player aha here we go this is probably copyrighted music so I can't play it too long okay well play something let's pick another random one [Music] okay not trying to get a copyright strike today that is just so fascinating to me this machine was running a radio station let's see what's in the recycle bin okay a shortcut apparently wow this thing was being used all the way up to 2013 no wonder that hard drive's bearing sounded terrible all right I'm going to poke around and see what the latest date stamp I can find is okay so far we're up to 2016. that is insane they definitely got their money's worth out of this machine oh hey I found the drivers for that audio card no point in copying them off of here because I already took an image of this hard drive but at least we can get some info let's see okay so just install instructions but there's an address for that company let's see what's inversion.text okay cool this driver will work on XP okay this is funny I found a bunch of radio ads on here I never have time to eat breakfast at home I'm Dr mom if your kids don't eat at home look into breakfast at school a message from the southeast Dairy Association [Music] say for retirement with U.S savings bonds get them where you work a bank now because there is life after retirement gone [Laughter] that was the most 2002 thing I've ever heard okay a couple of these spots do identify the radio station and that radio station is still around so I think it's probably best I keep that to myself I just think it's so cool that this thing was sitting there running playing all these spots over the radio all right let's shut this thing down wow what a fun little system I don't know I just generally geek out over radio related stuff I just think it's so cool that thousands upon thousands of people were hearing the sound stored on this machine over the air and it's always a good day when I find some retro professional audio peripherals I'm very pleased to see that missing capacitor is not affecting anything at least not obviously let's move on to the next system all right let's see how similar this machine is see right off the bat we have a 40 speed CD-ROM drive instead of a CD burner so that's different obviously this case is exactly the same looks like that floppy drive is not mounted correctly aha there's a Common Thread we got one of those radio resource stickers so this must have come from the same station but we do not have a fancy audio card instead we just have a video card with VGA and DVI outputs got a Nick down there and everything else on board and that sticker says XP 1700 plus which is a type of AMD Athlon CPU all right let's get this thing open and this case opens up the same way as the last system slide this top piece off [Music] and then get that panel off and we got some more radio resource labels in here see this thing had its power supply and CPU fan replaced possibly in 2006 and this one has a different motherboard got an MSI k7t Turbo 2 in there and we got a hard drive in this one too this drive cage is not properly secured so let's go ahead and get that out of there foreign cables out of here might as well get the power supply disconnected now let's check out that video card and see it's made by number nine but there's not many other identifying marks on it looks like it might be an S3 Savage being from 1999 it's probably a Savage four see if there's anything on the back of it well that's no help but at least it's fairly clean very light dust let's put that to the side now let's check out that Nick and same as the last system it's a 3com 10 100 Nick with the Wake online connector there also fairly clean all right let's check out that CPU [Music] and yeah that looks like an AMD Athlon to me it has some fairly fresh thermal grease on it and luckily this socket is intact let's clean that thermal grease off of there now let's get it out of there and it is indeed an AMD Athlon 1700 well they were serious about these warranty stickers I don't like how close those are to the pins so I'm going to take them off but luckily all those pins look good all right got those stupid stickers as well as their residue off of there let's get that chip back in now let's see what we have for Ram got a 512 Meg stick of PC 133 here and more warranty stickers let's check out the next one okay no size or speed on that side and not on this side but all these chips are marked and that adds up to 512 Megs so we should have a gig of ram in this thing very good and now that I look closer someone did go ham on that CPU socket but luckily that's just superficial damage and this system is even cleaner than the last one I don't even see a need to pull that board out yeah just look at that fan that thing looks brand new even that heatsink is super clean I sure wish more systems were like this the bearing's a little bit noisy so I guess I'll go ahead and give it some oil yeah that is incredibly clean note to self buy more computers from radio stations all right got that bearing freshened up sounding better and got the heatsink mating surface cleaned up though it is kind of scratchy clearly somebody took a screwdriver to it at some point but that's no big deal that's what the thermal compound is for so let's get that on now let's get the cold machine back on and here's that floppy drive a mitsumi model d-359m3 let's go ahead and open it up and super clean in here that's pretty amazing even the grease is still greasy I'm still going to clean the heads though and clearly wasn't even a need for that and here's that hard drive 30 gigabyte Western Digital Caviar manufactured February 12 2001. let's hope we don't have any bearing issues out of this one and here's the CD drive it's a light on model ltn382 manufactured August 1999. a little bit older than the rest of the system okay let's see if that power supply has any fireworks in store for us yep that failed immediately and it's making an incredibly high pitched sound let's turn that off okay clearly that thing's no good but who would I be if I didn't try that again let's see yeah it's just whining no explosions oh well have we finally killed the sacrificial hard drives let's see of course not I don't know what it's going to take to kill those well off to the spare part spin it goes [Music] okay let's get that faceplate disconnected now we'll see just how clean this system really is let's get that face plate off and yep back of the faceplate always tells the real story and as always the Magic Eraser is our friend [Music] all right that's better and that CMOS battery is super dead so let's replace it all right swapped in a good power supply so let's see if we have any life power on [Music] so I don't hear that hard drive spinning up I also have no post and no post beeps this thing's acting dead okay I pulled the peripheral cards back out so let's see if we get any complaints about lack of video card nothing so the lack of activity on that hard drive is kind of ominous I wonder if when that power supply went bad if it took out a bunch of things with it so let's pull that out and bench test it all right let's see and not even so much as a click that hard drive is very dead let's pull the logic board off and see if there's anything obvious well I can't find anything obviously wrong with it everything looks to be in order there's no shorts on the 12 or 5 volt rails okay well I took another look and I found what appears to be a tiny little bubble on that controller chip so yeah this thing got taken out well that's curtains for this hard drive however who would I be if I didn't try to swap over the controller board from the hard drive of the last system now I don't expect it to work because this drive is a later revision these are two different capacity drives but who knows let's try okay well despite very similar looking boards we do have a misaligned screw hole here so I'm about 95 sure this isn't going to work but since we already got this far might as well see here we go and yep nothing okay well there's no hope for the hard drive but let's see what the post analyzer card says about the motherboard oh oh now we have life that's awfully strange I'm tempted to think that the hard drive was holding it back but I tried powering this thing on off camera with the hard drive disconnected and it was still dead okay well let's get the video card back in there and see what it does alright once again [Music] aha now we're posting and we counted up a gig of RAM let's get that floppy drive back in there all right got the floppy drive back in with the Dos boot disk let's see and I gotta seek warning CPU has been changed so it wants me to enter the CPU speed let's go see what that's all about frequency and voltage control okay well I'm just going to leave everything default save and exit and we're booting oh that's a noisy old floppy Drive I love it all right the CD driver is loaded let's see if that thing works oh cool it's got the little flip down door and it opened right up let's see if it'll read a CDR and yep sure does okay well let's try to boot this thing in the gnopics looks like it wants to and that video card is an S3 Savage four all right made it to the graphical environment I didn't hear the startup sound so let's try to play a sound machine startup sequence all right Sound Works let's see I'm pretty sure this card has no 3D acceleration at least on this version of napix but let's see oh it does well that's cool let's go ahead and kill that okay I think we tortured this machine enough let's shut this thing down initiating shutdown sequence well it plays a shutdown sound well I really thought this thing was a goner I'm still not 100 sure that the power supply is what killed the hard drive but there's not many other things that can cause a bubble in a chip like that well luckily it didn't take out anything else obviously but it's too bad we didn't get to see what kind of radio stuff was on this one guess I'll just have to hold out hope for the next one Speaking of which let's move on to the next system and now the final system got a nice 52-speed Sony CD burner there and got some info here see this machine is also running Windows 2000 Service Pack 4. got an AMD simpron CPU and looks like we have two hard drives in this machine assuming they're actually in there I'm curious to see if either of those work been having some pretty rotten luck with hard drives in this Trio and we have a nice Sony floppy drive here got the embossed Sony logo there I've had pretty good luck with these drives in the past and here's the back of the machine got a pretty modern looking power supply there looks like it might have had one of those Pro Audio cards because those are the same markings from the first system and everything else is on board and we got some more labels here marked August 31st 2014 for some reason and we've got a pretty ominous slave on the top here motherboard dead well let's find out just how dead it is let's get this thing open and same as all the others foreign we do indeed have two hard drives and a bunch of sporty blue zip ties that's Fancy no peripheral cards so let's go ahead and get these drives disconnected [Music] all right gonna have to snip these zip ties let's get power off that motherboard and this system's not nearly as clean as the last two let's check out that CPU got a nice big old hunk of copper on that heatsink and this thing's got some weight to it though we definitely had some Modern Art going on with the thermal paste application and yep that's a sempron let's get that out of there and as foretold by the labels got an AMD simpron 2300 plus Pretty Dirty luckily all the pins look good let's get that cleaned up well I don't have high hopes for this CPU see we have some damage here along the edge of the die and that's usually caused by somebody going ham on the heatsink installation now I've seen chips like this run perfectly fine in the past so that may not be a complete deal breaker and the CPU fan sounds perfectly fine well let's see what we got for Ram all right no guesswork there got a 512 Meg stick of ddr1 it's a nice holographic label minimally Dusty let's put that to the side and now that I'm looking in that area see we have a damaged component here it looks like it's just lifted maybe it definitely has an excessive amount of flux on it so maybe somebody attempted to repair before let's pull this motherboard out let's get that front panel disconnected okay now that I look closer it looks like that is the stock flux and that component most likely overheated and this side is completely lifted off the board and it doesn't look like it was ripped off and that component is dead short well let's go ahead and get it off the board see it blew its guts out of the bottom and I have no idea what value it is it's got some numbers on the top 441 b320b well you know what let's test it anyway let's just short that power on connector aha okay posts anyway all right I guess we're not so dead it does have the memory clock speed wrong well I guess let's change that dead battery this is funny every single one of these drives is loose [Music] laughs I just love it that floppy Drive is being held in with one screw and here's our hard drives configured as the master we have 160 gigabyte Seagate Barracuda and as a slave we have a 40 gigabyte Samsung spin point so I guess those labels are lying and here's that floppy drive it's a Sony mpf-920 manufactured October 2004. let's wipe that off pretty nasty let's clean that out all right let's clean [Music] and grease and there's that Sony CD burner also manufactured October 2004. swipe that off well let's see what's behind door number three and you win dust B4 after unfortunately we do have some plastic damage on that logo not much I can do about that alright this power supply seems kind of suspicious let's see if it's a killer now it's doing okay so I wonder what injured that motherboard all right we're five minutes in no fireworks all right time for the real test see what this thing does okay sounds happy enough and all our drives are detected let's continue with defaults it is certainly acting strange hmm doesn't want to boot from the hard drive well let's get into the BIOS and see if everything's in order [Music] okay we got the correct data rate for the memory now let's go to Advanced bios features yes that's a boot to the hard drive well let's see if it boots to DOS okay well it starts to boot it's being very laggy okay but we made it let's try the CD drive hey it opened right up a little Dusty though let's see if it reads a CDR ome and sure does well let's try booting from the hard drive again maybe the BIOS was just a little bit confused it's got all those discs out of there okay after an unreasonable amount of time got a disc boot failure so I'm going to try cleaning up the edge connector on that Ram stick and see if that changes anything okay that changed nothing oh but it looks like it might boot in Optics let's see nope that didn't get very far all right yeah this motherboard is completely unhappy a kernel panic is kinda sort of the Linux version of a blue screen of death well you know what let's try swapping these hard drives into the system too Windows doesn't always take kindly to such things but you never know okay it's trying to boot see if it works [Music] huh it's got Windows XP on it oh well I guess there's too many Hardware differences for all Windows activation well let's see I'll humor you oh that's not good good way let's see if I can use my future powers to get through this aha I thought it could keep me out all right let's see what this thing has on it I wonder what vinyl deck is okay apparently it doesn't work hey it's got Cool Edit Pro on it all right let's see what else see what Viper is well that doesn't work what is this smartwave converter okay so it must be an MP3 decoder let's see what kind of documents do we have on here nothing apparently Viper is some kind of Internet Security program well let's see what's on the other hard drive apparently it's a backup Drive well there's nothing much on C drive at all or D drive see what's in there so yeah that system must have had that fancy audio card in there well nothing too interesting in here let's see what's in documents okay there's lots of documents in here with lots of names see if I can figure out when the last time this thing was used okay looks like 2008 but I saw a folder that said 2010 which was apparently created in 2005. that's awfully Forward Thinking of them okay we got date stamps as latest 2014 on here ah we're up to 2016. this station definitely got their money's worth out of these computers no wonder they're all half dead oh is that an old version of Firefox oh I haven't seen that interface in a while the version is this Firefox 48. hey we're up to date okay that's enough necromancing this system let's shut this thing down [Music] well what a heartbreaker I wonder if replacing that capacitor will fix this thing kind of doubtful of it but hey at least everything else Works still can't believe these are running in a radio station that could be the most unique application I've found so far and I actually really like these cases there's a lot of thought that went into the design of these and I'll definitely be using one of these systems for something in the future and as always thank you very much to everyone who's pledged their support on patreon and if you're new here and you like this video check out my previous videos I've got quite a few in this format now it's also a lot more coming so be sure to subscribe but that's all for this video thanks for watching

Channel: MikeTech

Views: 56,200

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Id: jt2fAPex-V4

Length: 31min 39sec (1899 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 14 2023