Someone threw these vintage computers in the garbage! Let's see if we can get them working!

hello everyone so I was doing my usual weekend rounds of checking out yard sales when I spotted these three systems in somebody's garbage I almost couldn't believe my eyes because I almost never see computers of this vintage in the trash anymore now back in the 90s computer technology was advancing so quickly that your brand new computer could be almost completely obsolete in just a few years and this rapid upgrade cycle translated to a lot of pretty decent computers being discarded pretty often so as a young kid who was enamored with computers trash days in Philadelphia were like a treasure hunt for my dad and I we could bring home three or four systems every week with no effort at all almost well these days that doesn't happen very much for me anymore especially because I now live in a much smaller City and when it does happen they're usually boring modern computers not worth a Second Glance so you can understand why I nearly wrecked my car when I laid eyes on these these all look to be mid to late 90s or maybe early 2000s computers but I haven't opened them up yet because I wanted to save my excitement for the video but I can already tell they're full of goodies but the wait is finally over so let's tear into these okay I'm going to start with this one because it seems to be the oldest of the three and I just wanted to point out something funny this is not actually a floppy drive it's actually just a uh cover for the floppy Drive Bay I've always found those pretty silly even back in the day and having a look around the back we can see it's an at system looks pretty well populated with peripheral cards got a dial-up modem here some kind of sound card got our game port and a Serial port and there's just a standard serial and parallel port that's probably a breakout i o shield for one of these other cards and we've got some kind of video card let's go ahead and take this cover off and see what's got inside now in contrast to Modern ATX systems on these old ones the the entirety of the outer metal comes off so all they have to do is slide it back lift it off and fortunately it looks pretty clean inside it does not have a hard drive so we're gonna have to boot it up from disk if it powers on however I see got the uh Top Drive Bay cover sitting in there however the sound card has an audio cable for a CD-ROM drive so it must add a CD drive installed at some point so let's go ahead and start clearing out these cables grab this just an IDE cable just go ahead and pull those off now that's interesting this is a vlb system you can see how it has the extra slot on the end of the ISA slot that's called vlb or Vasa local bus it's kind of sort of a precursor to PCI it was developed to overcome the speed limitations of Isa itself vlb would allow the peripheral card direct access to the CPU and it was primarily developed as an answer to increased video performance at the time your only options were either Isa or IBM's proprietary MCA system but while MCA was much faster than Isa it was pretty heavily locked down by IBM there were a lot of Licensing costs associated with using it and that really hindered adoption of MCA which is honestly a good thing and of course PCI replaced all of that but before PCI was a thing vlb was the next best thing so let's go ahead and start pulling some cards out now that's interesting it has a um I guess that's for the hard drive LED plugged right into the i o card so I'm just going to go ahead and disconnect that careful to note the polarity and I'm going to start by removing the video card [Music] so having a look at the back here oh that's interesting number nine computer Corporation wow that's funny it's got a BBS number on it BBS stands for bulletin board service that was kind of like the World Wide Web before HTTP basically you'd set your computer to dial up to this service it would be almost like a remote terminal and you can do things like download files and get information made in USA the year mark this 1994. all right well moving on let's go ahead and pull out that I O board and see this little breakout Shield partially connects to the i o board I guess this was connected to the sound card maybe no that doesn't have a pin header for the game Port I guess they just had that thrown in there so let's go ahead and disconnect that [Music] [Music] that's really stuck in there [Music] looks like a pretty standard i o board that is interesting though I've never seen an i o board with the vlb connector capacitor here looks like it's seen better days nothing too interesting on the back let's take a look at the sound card [Music] and it is a sound blaster 16 with only one IDE Channel [Music] looks like pretty clean card let's pull that out of there actually looks like this machine doesn't have any on-board IDE so now I can take a look at that CPU I can tell it's a 486. fortunately the heatsink's not glued to it so let's just slide that off and oh whoa it's an AMD 486 I haven't seen one of those in Forever that is an AM 486 dx4 clocked at 100 megahertz I sure hope that thing works I'm just going to go ahead and slide that heatsink back on [Music] now let's get these power connectors out of the way and have a look at the ram [Music] takes the standard at Power connectors looks like we got a single stick of sim Ram this board actually takes both the 72 and 30 pin variants of the Sim modules let's go ahead and pull that out of there [Music] looks like it's a 16 megabyte module [Music] I'm just going to go ahead and put that back in there [Music] and it looks like the chips for the CPU cache are fully populated and this last peripheral card is just a regular old dial-up modem let's go ahead and pull that out of there just have a look at it [Music] pretty densely packed circuit there [Music] looks like it's a 28.8k zoom modem that thing is slow okay well let's go ahead and test this power supply see if it's any good and then we'll try to get this thing to boot up so the power switch is on these old AT Systems actually physically disconnect the mains voltage from the power supply so you don't need the power supply to be plugged into the motherboard in order to power it on so I've got the power supply still disconnected from the motherboard so we're gonna flip it on see if we get a smoke show well that Fan's definitely not happy yeah that fans have an issues I wonder if that's a voltage issue or if it's just mechanically stuck [Music] I'm gonna guess that's a mechanical problem because it definitely didn't like when I did that maybe once it gets a few more revs in it'll distribute its grease internally yeah it's definitely not going well in there I guess I won't be playing doom on this power supply okay so I ended up just poking a hole in that sticker and injecting some oil into the fan bearing and it spun right up and that should at least last us through a test it's either that or I just added a bunch of fuel oil for the impending fire that's about to happen all right all the power supply voltages checked out so got it reconnected to the motherboard it's powered on oh motherboard is definitely not happy but it's probably just complaining because all of its peripheral cards are out looks like that CPU fan is not having a good time oh that's real sticky looks like somebody already poked a hole in the sticker to get at the fan bearing and it's getting pretty warm I wonder if I give it some oil if it'll come back to life [Music] okay well it took quite a workout but it did start working again and that hole in the sticker on the top side is just incidental because the bearing is only accessible from the underside that faces the heatsink but yeah it's perfectly happy now okay in addition to the video card I also reinstalled the i o board since I'm pretty sure the motherboard probably wouldn't be too happy about missing its floppy controller so let's go ahead and connect the Monitor and see what this thing does all right got the monitor connected so let's power it on hey posted and made considerably fewer angry sounds I think that weird buzzing in the beginning is just counting the ram I think some old systems did that okay well these are pretty reasonable complaints so I better go get a keyboard all right got a keyboard so let's run setup whoa what is this oh that is crazy this thing has a GUI bios see this thing doesn't even have any uh PS2 Mouse ports or anything I'd have to break out a Serial Mouse let's see what's in standard pretty normal stuff [Music] so let's go ahead and set that to 1.44 obviously we don't have any hard drives so let's see if it'll at least attempt to boot from floppy save changes and exit [Music] okay still complaining [Music] keeps taking me back to the BIOS I might need to put a fresh CMOS battery in there all right CMOS batteries just a regular old CR2032 these batteries don't tend to leak although that screw below it is suspiciously corroded but let's go ahead and swap it out for a fresh one okay these battery terminals look a little bit funny so I'm just going to go ahead and clean them up the fiberglass scratch pen all right fresh batteries in let's see what it does okay that's looking better let's go ahead and reconfigure the CMOS there we go now let's check in the disk drive all right let's go ahead and insert our dos boot disk [Music] hey it's working yeah this thing's working pretty amazing how resilient these things are okay well this thing's going to need hard drive and a CD drive so I'm going to go ahead and put it back together and declare it a success and move on to the other systems okay moving on to what looks like the second oldest system it is unfortunately missing the turbo button but this case is kind of beat up so I don't know if there's any fixing or reusing it got a 32 speed CD-ROM drive you can see it's also an at system and also has a decent complement of peripheral cards got some kind of video card and a lan card and interestingly enough has USB we've got our PS2 connector and what looks like a bus Mouse connector it's either a bus mouse or Microsoft import that's definitely something I don't see very often anymore and finally some kind of sound card all right let's go and open this thing up and this machine opens up the same way as the first one let's slide it back lift it off okay I can already see you've got something nasty down there gross okay not as clean as the other system but close enough at least we have a hard drive so that's good I'm gonna give that boots and I see dim modules up there so this is most likely opinion system let's try to pop that heatsink off and confirm [Music] and yep Intel Pentium one so let's go ahead and put that heatsink back on [Music] all right let's pop out that sound card got a sound blaster awe 64. it's fairly clean very nice let's go ahead and remove that land card pretty basic most likely a 10 100 and finally the video card S3 Trio 64. just like the first system that's interesting it's got a IBM part number interesting say we've got a failed rubber band on this IDE cable yep there's the remnants of what once was a rubber band let's pull this IDE cable out of here [Music] foreign looks like we got two IDE channels pretty normal onboard IDE also have the onboard floppy controller and this machine takes both at and ATX power connectors so that's good gives me some options if that power supply is no good I'm gonna go ahead and remove power from both the drives [Music] all right let's get a good look at that hard drive [Music] classic Western Digital Caviar two gigabyte IDE Drive [Music] that back in there and let's go ahead and unplug the power supply from the motherboard another motherboard's barely in there now that Ram is really difficult to get to with this drive cage in the way the drive cage is removable but I think I can get it [Music] there we go [Music] no identifying marks but it's definitely either pc100 or pc133 [Music] oh yeah it says right there pc100 no clues as to the Ram size let's check out the other stick okay this one has even fewer identifying marks okay you're just gonna have to see what it counts up to let's get those back in there and just like the previous system this thing takes line voltage straight to the power switch so let's power it on okay the fan ramped up and then shut off interesting let's try that again okay that switch is probably bad I'm having to hold it down where it could just be due to the fact that that face Plate's pretty tweaked yeah it does not stay on and take that face plate off okay yeah that's just the face plate interfering with the switch operation okay well things seem stable I'm gonna go ahead and do a voltage test all right all the Bulls I just checked out good so let's power it on now unfortunately in addition to the front panel connector being completely disconnected these connectors have also been cut off so we're not going to be able to rely on any post beeps to see if this thing's alive so I'm gonna have to put the video card back in at least see if we get some activity on the screen before I do that let's just see if anything on the motherboard blows up [Music] okay no explosions at least the CPU fan on this one's happy go ahead and put the video card back in all right monitor connected power on oh it's posting looks like it's got 16 Megs of memory that doesn't seem right okay I'm gonna go and Shuffle around that Ram I don't believe that Ram count it seems awfully low for a Pentium one okay I just removed the lower RAM stick and we're still at 16 Megs so yeah definitely got a problem with that lower stick okay just went ahead and cleaned up that edge connector on the ram stick and reseeded it a couple of times and now we're up to 50 Megs it's far more believable okay I'm gonna go ahead and reconnect the hard drive and see if this thing boots [Music] okay I also reconnected the CD drive because the hard drive is actually set as the slave so let's see what it does all right power on hard drive sounds fairly healthy and it's detected oh look at that it's booting got Windows 98 on it but it is taking a very long time to boot we are now at 10 minutes it's been sitting at the Windows 98 splash screen but the hard drive does not sound unhealthy but that's sometimes just how it goes with Windows 98 well somebody definitely like the ocean this thing took a full 12 minutes to get to this point somebody was definitely heavy into the uh Windows theme customization [Music] okay it's got an account on there Nana apparently this was somebody's grandmother's computer well let's see if it's got a password no password [Music] I guess Windows 98 has no clue what to do with this monitor let's just see close enough and finally about 15 minutes later we have a desktop looks like there's plenty of stuff on this thing Nana definitely like the ocean [Music] AOL Instant Messenger oh the memories it's even got an old version of Microsoft Word on it it's like it's got the full Office Suite this thing still has Nana and his old documents on it with the newest date stamp being July 2004. this machine definitely got its use hello MSN Messengers popped up one of the many things that are slowing down this computer in the background [Music] two gigabyte hard drive thing is slam full I guess Nana wasn't too into gaming [Music] [Music] come on you can do it there we go yeah it's definitely got the full Office Suite on here let's see let's see how long it takes word to open actually that opened pretty quick sure taking its time to close two minutes later closed gotta see if AOL Instant Messenger opens yes it does wow that brings back memories still has the password saved in there lots of accounts but apart from the terrible slowness this machine's running perfectly fine uh oh what's this peer-to-peer networking Oh I thought it might have a Napster or something well it looks like it's some form of Napster I think we found the reason for the slowness file sharing programs even has Yahoo messenger on it oh man the trouble I used to get into an old Yahoo messenger okay well not much else on here except for what looks like some pretty personal stuff which I'm not going to show but hey this machine's working let's go ahead and shut it down this is going to take a while sure hope that Scuba guys got plenty of oxygen he's not coming back up for a while all right shut down you see how that taskbar just slowly disappeared that is funny [Music] I'm gonna have to edit this pretty heavily but it took about four minutes to get to this point and finally it took about 10 minutes total to shut down and here we have the classic sign of an at system it's now safe to turn off your computer okay so I booted it back up because I forgot to test the CD-ROM drive and this time it was much faster and the system is much more responsive very strange another thing that's strange is it now reports in erroneous five and a quarter inch floppy drive and I didn't change any of the bio settings or anything so that's weird okay well let's see if the CD-ROM drive works no it doesn't want to open oh there it goes just needed a little bit of convincing and that is a definite no on the CD-ROM drive working sounds like something's internally stuck in there so it could probably be taken apart freed up but I'm not terribly desperate for IDE CD-ROM drives so that'll be a project for much later but yeah this thing is much snappier now okay moving right along to our final system this is the only ATX system out of the three got a 44 speed CD-ROM drive it is missing the power supply but we've got a fair number of peripheral cards installed and this thing is filthy let's go ahead and open it up foreign not a whole lot going on in here I can see it's either Pentium two or Pentium three based on it being the um they call a socket it's a slot slash socket and actually I'm going to start with that because I want to see what kind of CPU that is [Music] looks like the other leg of that is broken off all right this thing's pretty filthy also couldn't get that heatsink off of there okay now it's looking more like a Celeron or something pull it out and it is indeed an Intel Celeron just go ahead and put that back in there [Music] all right starting with the video card that is an AGP video card [Music] no marks in the front but it looks an awful lot like an Nvidia card and indeed it is tnt2 with 16 megabytes of RAM let's go ahead and check out the sound card that was barely in there [Music] and it is Sound Blaster live copyright 2003 next let's have a look at the network card standard issue real Tech network card a lot of the stuff on here has the a open stickers and finally the dial-up modem [Music] us robotics most likely a 56k modem judging by the age of the rest of the components pretty fancy okay apparently I've intruded on somebody's home [Music] that is a giant spider [Music] [Music] okay we just got a pile of various cables and crap here and out of there [Music] and apparently he's coming out for vengeance [Music] all right dude I'm gonna need you to go hey at least he's a Cooperative spider just get you back where you belong bye bye okay apart from the eight-legged Horrors there's not much else inside this machine I see that the connectors for the front panel have also been cut on this and here is what appears to be the other part of the CPU bracket let's take a look at the ram and the first sticks 32 megabytes most likely pc100 [Music] okay 128 Megs of RAM [Music] and finally 64 megagram all right guys ATX power supply connected so let's see if the single post and post it does not I guess that spider was doing more in there than just being terrifying okay well the CPU and the GPU are getting warm so they're definitely getting power I swapped around the ram but no change so what I'm going to do is I'm going to swap in the video card from Nana's computer since we know that's a known working video card and see what it does and we've got no love from Nana's GPU either but you know what that's a good thing because that probably means the uh Nvidia tnt2 card might still be good and that's definitely worth the encounter with a giant spider okay I went ahead and connected a little speaker just in case it had any uh beep codes I wasn't hearing and I got nothing even with all the ram removed this motherboard is profoundly unhappy but hey I'm perfectly okay with that this was definitely the system I was least interested in and two out of three ain't bad okay well I just tested the Nvidia card in Nana's computer and I'm happy to report that it does in fact work I also tested all of the Ram from that computer and it all works too so all that spider wrangling was not in vain alright so in total I ended up with two working systems and this lovely pile of Parts here and I'm more than happy about that especially since I've been trying to build up my collection of systems and parts from this era these parts are getting increasingly expensive and hard to find in fact I'm sure there's at least two to three hundred dollars worth of Parts here just based on completed eBay listings if you like this kind of content I'm doing things like this all the time so be sure to subscribe but that's all for this video thanks for watching

Channel: MikeTech

Views: 97,482

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Id: eBGK-gm7a60

Length: 32min 33sec (1953 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 22 2023