[easygoing lounge music] [floppy drive noises]
[computer plopping down]
Greetings and welcome to an LGR restoration thing!
And today, we've got a late '90s almost-classic.
This is a Gateway Essential 450 from 1999.
It's a Pentium III-based PC built to run Windows 98, and beyond that, I'm not yet 100% certain
about its specs or if everything inside works, but finding out and fixing it up is what we're
about to do.
Right, so this Gateway, does it work?
Eh, hopefully?
First a little backstory, because while I do know that it at least powered on the first
time I checked, that was years ago, 2014 I believe.
And it's just kinda sat in storage 'til I got a chance to work on it, which is today.
What happened was it was one of those situations where I was picking up another retro computer,
actually something much older, and I happened to notice this thing sitting over in the corner,
being unused.
I was interested and so we just turned it on, and it powered on just fine, booted up
into Windows and I'm like, hey do you wanna get rid of this thing, too?
She's just like, yeah you can have it, so here it is.
[Clint grunts] It's, uh...
Yeah look at it, it's still got the quality seal right there, so I'm assuming
that means it hasn't been, well, I don't know, that doesn't look like a thing that I've seen
on my other Gateway computers, so I'm assuming maybe it's been upgraded by a third party
and they just put this little sticker on here, I don't know.
And around back though, it looks pretty typical, like they maybe have switched out a graphics
card or sound card in here, 'cause this looks, I don't know, I really, I just don't know,
so that's one thing we're gonna be finding out in this video is what's been done to this,
if anything.
You know, how it's configured, what's going on inside.
But yeah, it is the Essential 450, and that was part of Gateway's main lineup of computers
they had in 1998, '99, like the year 2000.
But according to this printout of the ad here, it looks like the 450 was a higher end version
of the Essential series, so yeah.
This may be the specs that this has, but, you know, from looking it up, there were a
bunch of different variants of the 450, so who knows exactly what's inside there.
But as you can see, I mean, they have some pretty nice kind of options for someone that
wants to play Windows 98 games and such on here, you know, AGP Graphics and Sound Blaster
and, you know, other things that you might want, it's just one of those cool Pentium
III systems and that's why I wanted to pick it up and see what I could do with it.
And you can see there was also some nice upgrades available, you know, Gravis GamePad and a
Zip drive, Boston Acoustics 3-Piece Speaker System, DVD-ROM.
Yeah anyway, yeah, let's just take a look and see what's actually inside here and get
it restored and working again.
[Clint grunts] It sure is heavy.
It's got some nice rubber feet on the bottom that prevents it from sliding around, so I
might actually put down like a towel or something, 'cause yeah, all right, let's open it up.
And yeah, it actually looks like it comes with, yeah, thumb screws from the factory,
which is not the most common thing on just your standard consumer desktops of the time
period.
At least I don't have very many that do that.
It's really just like servers, you know, higher-end IBM machines that had, oh yeah, forgot about
the seal.
Let's see what we can do without breaking the seal, can we.
Yeah whatever.
All right.
Ooh, that is kinda nasty.
Hmm.
Well nice mixture of cobwebs and dust and grime.
We'll have to do a bit of a cleaning on this, for sure.
There's an ISA slot down there, that's kinda cool.
And we got five PCI slots, one AGP slot.
That looks like a Voodoo, yeah it is, holy crap!
That's a Voodoo 3.
This is not what I expected to see in here.
I mean, Gateway did have an OEM situation going on with the Voodoo 3, they called it
like the 3000 G, is the other ones that I have.
Got the Sound Blaster card here.
That looks like a, yeah, CT5803.
I think that's a 128.
And then we have a modem here which, who cares [laughs], probably take that out, I don't
know.
Actually, this might be going to someone else, another YouTuber who I won't name, but his
name is brutalmoose, and he might not actually need that and may prefer to have Ethernet,
I don't know.
Maybe I just won't mess with it and leave it at the end, but yeah, and here is the processor.
It's a Pentium III of some kind, I don't know exactly the denomination or whatever, speed.
And then there's this cooling system that Gateway did at the time, and a few other companies.
And it all goes through the power supply, which always just seemed like a bad idea to
me.
And considering how many of these power supplies I've replaced on various Gateways over the
years, and on IBM, like NetVistas that used a very similar system, you know, maybe it
wasn't the best idea.
But whatever, that's what they did.
And yeah, there's a hard disk, let's see what kinda size that is.
Well, the capacity's covered up, but it does say November 17th, 1999.
And we got some RAM there.
I think these came with 64 megs for the most part.
You know what, let's just go ahead and turn it on.
'Cause other than being dirty, it looks okay.
I'm not seeing like bulging caps or anything weird, leaky garbage or anything.
And like I said, when I first picked this up years ago, it turned on then.
So let's just see what happens when we get it powered on.
Schwew, ho ho, that thing is so gross, look at all this.
Mm-kay, let's just turn it on, see what happens.
[motor whirring] [laughs] Yeah, there's the Voodoo 3 1000 G. Let's see what we got here
in the system setup.
All right so that is a 450 megahertz Pentium III, as the model number insinuated.
And that's what I figured, but you never know.
And honestly, everything looks pretty standard.
In fact, the time and date are even correct, so I guess the battery in there is still fine.
Might replace that anyway, but yeah, good times, good times.
So far so good, nothing exploding.
It does smell like, oof, not good [laughs].
What is this?
Gateway GoBack.
There we go, got Windows 98 going.
Yeah, that old cobwebs and dust smell is only growing more increased as the fans do their
thing and everything warms up.
All right, actually a pretty quick boot, all things considered.
At least to this point.
And yeah, there we go, I mean, ooh, yep, yeah.
So desktop management wasn't exactly a priority for the lady who had this in the past.
But that's okay, she's like in her 70s.
So right, well this is Windows 98 with a lot of crap going on.
What all is it even loading?
Oh my word.
That poor hard drive just wants to die.
And it's just sitting here, nothing is happening really.
What is JAWS, I've never heard of this.
A screen reading software.
Well that makes sense.
Yeah, like I said, older lady, she was very nice.
But you know, she's getting older, didn't need her computers anymore.
And so yeah, let's see what is actually on this thing.
This is what I'm mostly curious about right here.
Okay so we do have 64 megs of RAM.
Looks like it did have a Zip drive at some point, but no longer does.
Yeah, all pretty expected stuff here.
Let's see what we got.
Oh my [laughs].
Wow.
Mm-hmm, Microsoft IntelliPoint drivers, shortcuts to shortcuts to shortcuts, just classic.
Spybot S&D, another classic.
Gain Publishing, who knows what installed that.
RealPlayer, Rand McNally Trip Maker 1996, there used to be some sort of Hoyle, I don't
know, card game, something another, probably.
This Gateway GoBack thing, I'm assuming that's like a system restore deal.
I've never actually had that installed on any of the Gateways I've had from this era,
but there it is.
'Kay, hard disk space, it's a 10 gig drive, okay, so that's a little more than I expected.
I think, so a lot of them are configured with 6.4.
Yeah, it's just standard configuration stuff on here.
Honestly you could probably clean up this installation and have it be pretty good.
But I really just want to restore this to factory original condition.
All right so, I know that one thing that Gateway did is they have the restore CDs and thankfully,
I do have that.
I mean, I could just go with like classic Windows 98 fresh install straight from Microsoft,
but I think I wanna use the restoration discs.
All right, so we'll need some software.
And thankfully, Gateway provided these software storage binders for all their systems back
in the day.
Very handy to keep all your restoration stuff in one spot.
Yeah they did supply these very handy system restore CDs back then.
I don't know if this is the exact one that went with this exact computer or not.
I've got, there's like a ton of these.
I just pulled this one out of storage.
I think this is actually the same one.
It'll definitely work anyway.
So we're going to be starting with just the Windows 98 Second Edition CD installation,
and then the restore disc here.
Should have all the software and drivers and stuff that we'll need otherwise.
So yeah, let's get to it.
First up, I really just, I mean, we gotta clean this.
This is, it's horrendous.
It's really bad [laughs].
Like just this Voodoo card alone, this is, well I haven't seen this kind of dust accumulation
since doing work for like various IT things.
[Clint laughing] I'm trying to keep this in tact, 'cause it's kind of impressive.
Look at that.
I think it's safe to say this has not been cleaned or opened since 1999 or thereabouts.
This is really [coughs], all right, I need a mask and we're gonna take this outside.
All right just gonna blow everything out using a compressor on a vacuum here.
No sucky, only blowy.
[compressor humming] [peaceful lounge music] Well thank goodness I had a mask on for that,
that was terrible [laughs].
Little sticker came off here.
NS-TECH, I don't know if that's an original Gateway sticker or not.
All right I'm gonna take it back inside now and get all the individual components cleaned
a little more.
Well I don't know about you, but I already feel a lot better about working on this thing.
However, now it's time to get to the cleaning of all the other things.
Let's get started.
Mostly just a bunch of your normal kinda grossness where it was used the most.
Still though, even after a brief bit of wiping, you can already see we're getting some gunk.
Just going over the outside of it quickly with this sort of water vinegar mix.
And definitely seeing a few stubborn spots already.
[airplane buzzing] Why are there airplanes every two seconds?
[cat meowing] And there are a lot of sharp edges on this case, which means pretty typical
for the time but that's one reason I like to wear gloves like these.
I would have a few cuts already.
Like seriously, all those little, yeah, nope.
And I'm not gonna take the entire thing apart, 'cause honestly, I just don't care that much.
This is not, you know, some rare, valuable, worthy of museum kind of piece.
But I am gonna take those cards out because even though they were blown off, I mean here,
just, take a look at all that crap coming off of there, with just the littlest of wipes.
Yeah they need it.
[airplane humming] Oh come on airplanes, go away, what are you doing?
That's like the fifth flyby.
[Clint sighs] [airplane whirring] And just going over them with a bit of alcohol.
Is it just me or does that look like it's got a little bit of heat damage?
Well we will run it through its paces once we get it all reinstalled and such.
[laughs] You can see down there in the bottom, it's still pretty gross.
[laughs] Oh yeah, mm.
Ooh, yeah those would have been cuts.
Thank you gloves.
Yeah the more I think about it, the more I don't wanna keep this hard drive.
I think I might replace this with like an SD card solution, or something like that.
So we'll go ahead and take that thing out of here.
[Clint laughs] Ah, there's another screw.
Don't you hate it when you think you're done screwing and it's just like, oh, once more.
And you're like, but I'm tired.
There we go.
[metal clanging] Well.
Oh man, I've seen much worse, but it's certainly the worst I've had to deal with in a long
time.
You know what, I might just leave this in here, just as kind of a back up of sorts,
and then I'm going to install, oh my goodness, is it that airplane again?
[airplane humming] [Clint sighs] It is.
Seriously, this guy just get his pilot's license or like?
Come on man.
You're like right above the house.
Fly somewhere else.
Anyway, as I was going to say, just gonna use one of these SD card, SD to I to IDE [blows
raspberry], SD to IDE adapters.
It's got a power thing there to, you know, you can use the 4 pin from either floppy disk
or the original hard drive.
Got a 32 gig Class 10, you know, it's quick enough for this kind of usage, and it tends
to work pretty well.
This is what I use in my main Windows 98 Capture PC for awhile now, and it's doing great.
Do I have anywhere to mount it, though?
Not exactly, but we'll just sort of pop it in there.
[laughs] It's not a big deal, it'll be fine.
While we're in here, though, we'll go ahead and take a look at that RAM.
Haven't seen one of these in awhile.
This is a stick of Hyundai RAM, PC100.
Classic, used to have a, I believe it's a Compaq that had some Hyundai RAM like that.
64 whole megs, amazing.
We'll put that right back in there.
I could upgrade the RAM, but I don't see a need to.
I mean, it's a 450 megahertz Pentium III.
If I was to upgrade CPU, maybe, but just gonna leave it as is.
And yeah, just gotta go over some of these little corner spots with a brush, here.
Just to get the last bits of stupid crap.
Okay, guess I should take care of that battery.
All right, hope there's nothing weird with the BIOS, that it like doesn't know what to
do.
Sometimes you run into that and you'll replace the battery, and then it freaks out, and,
I don't know, I think this is an advanced enough BIOS, it'll be fine.
[relaxing lounge music] [airplane humming] Oh my word, there he comes again.
I swear, this is like the 10th time.
I've cut out so many of the planes, and yet they keep coming.
I hate you, sir.
I really do.
And I like airplanes, man.
It's just, why you gotta fly so low?
Over my house, in particular?
As much as I enjoy working on '90s computers, I hate this part of it.
About one of the unsung advancements in computing, just case design, ergonomics.
Literally everything about the process internally is better now.
Old cases with their weird bleh and the stupid caddies and trays and stuff, they can all
go straight to, okay.
This is coming along nicely.
In fact, I'm hoping this is like the easiest restoration, restoration, just cleaning up
and fixing up that I've ever done.
And that's really the whole idea, I'm just kind of doing this because I can.
Ooh I missed a spot.
Yeah this is oddly cathartic, just, you know, kind of like a Lego kit.
You're just sort of putting it all together, you know exactly how it works and how it's
supposed to look and stuff, and just getting it all clean and nice and pretty and functional.
Yeah that's it really.
Okay so as far as this thing goes, I don't believe, yeah there's no jumpers on here,
so plug in the IDE cable and then, yeah, we'll just use this 4 pin little extra power, and
that should be pretty much it for that.
I don't know what I'm gonna do with that yet, but we'll set it there for now.
You got a CD analog audio right here on the sound card.
Yeah screw it, we'll put the modem back in there, too.
And last but definitely not least, our Voodoo 3 1000 G that hopefully is fine.
[chuckles] Oh and in case you're wondering why I don't have like this mounted in our
front or back drive bay, I don't have one of those on hand right now.
But even the ones that I do have, they're all really weird in terms of their placement.
If you saw my Windows 98 Capture PC build, the bracket is too far over that way, it ends
up bunching up against things in the motherboard, where this is mounted, so you have to kind
of make a custom mount, and like I said, I just don't have one of those on hand, and
just kinda sucks and whatever.
It'll be fine in here for now, I just wanna get it up and running.
And there's our airplane friend again, I swear.
I swears.
Let's go ahead and get the front of this cleaned up, just a little bit more, 'cause it's still
kinda grimy.
[airplane humming] Maybe that guy's doing like tours or something.
I mean this is a weird day to do it.
It's like a Monday evening.
And it's raining.
I really don't know what that guy's doing.
[peaceful lounge music] Like all things considered, this is coming together nice and clean.
Haven't even had to break out the Magic Eraser yet, there's like one spot over here I probably
will, but other than that, I mean, this is, I mean it's one reason I picked it up all
those years ago, I was just like, yeah this looks like it has potential.
Yeah there's like these few spots that I think might be good for a multi eraser.
[chuckles] Super extra strength multi eraser.
Yeah that's like the one main scuff right there.
It's kind of in the plastic.
And this is plastic except for, nope, it's all plastic, the whole case.
Externally anyway.
Like obviously inside, there's a metal cage, but you know, late '90s cheapness.
Get the butt wiped off here while I'm looking at it.
It's good enough.
What little bit is left are like little bits of gouging.
But you know, that's how it goes.
I've noticed this has been sitting pretty lopsided this whole time, and I think that's
because, yeah these feet melted and moved.
Like there's one here, one here, not one here, and only one in the bottom, sort of, off to
the left.
So in the interest of completeness, we gonna fix that.
Come off there.
Nobody likes you.
And I've got just the thing here.
I like using these little furniture pads.
I mean, sometimes it makes sense to go with rubber or something, but these look like they're
about the right size.
And, you know, considering how annoying it was to just slide around.
I think that's a nice fit.
There we go [laughs].
Wee!
I like it.
Okay, now let me give it one more wipe to get some of that residue off of there.
And we'll get Windows 98 set up, hopefully, and yeah.
Power.
Very quiet without that hard disk.
And we've got a boot.
So let's see what it thinks of our SD hard disk alternative.
And there we go.
It detected that just fine which, awesome.
I've been really impressed with these SD adapters that are out there.
I mean, they're pretty brain-dead.
You know, well you have to, whatever, foolproof, that's the word I'm looking for.
You don't have to do much and they just kinda work.
We're gonna boot it from this disk then.
See what happens.
All right, got the CD detected, sweet.
[laid-back lounge music] And I forgot, I'm on an SSK keyboard.
Let's switch.
All right, so it does actually have it on there already.
Yes that means I don't have to do crap.
All right well, seems to be reading disks okay.
It's still probably gonna be a good idea to just clean out the inside of that thing, anyway.
Noticed it had one of those like foam edges around the disk front itself, and sometimes
those particles get in there and do weird crap, and honestly, it just needs a little
bit of cleaning anyway, so I'll do that later.
We'll see if we can get Windows going.
ScanDisk, you scan that SD card with nothing on it, see what you find.
All right, Windows 98 Setup.
Go with custom, because that's the way I roll.
Ooh and we're restarting.
That's always a good sign.
Yay!
Well this is not gonna be my machine so, actually does he use Pascal case?
We'll go with yes.
Product Key.
Here we go.
Sweet.
And yeah well, so far so good.
I think this might end up being pretty simple.
After this we'll just kind of run the restore CD for the Gateway applications and drivers
and all that crap, I think, and that should be about it.
Then we'll try some games.
Wow, that was a quick boot.
[laughs] It restarted and got right back to this in no time at all.
So we've got a very base Windows 98 installation here with no drivers.
[laughs] Gotta love those 16 color graphics.
So yeah, it's all good though, pretty much, so that's good stuff.
Cool.
Well let's go ahead and get that restore CD going, and yeah.
Ooh, look at all this stuff.
So instead of Clippy, we have a cow boxy, I suppose [laughs].
I'm here to help you out.
Nar-nah-nar.
Right so we got, yeah, hardware and software and all sorts of cool, I mean, we're pretty
much just gonna do all the stuff, but let's go ahead and do the software for now.
Like I'm gonna replace some of these drivers with like better ones, anyway, so whatever,
I guess.
But we'll just install it by default first and see how it goes.
Yay graphics.
So we have 800x600 16 bit.
Good, good, good.
Yeah well, I'll just let it do the rest of its thing here, and I'll come back whenever
it's got all these drivers and software things out of the way.
[Windows 98 startup sound] Installation of drivers and software completed, although I
did opt not to install a lot of the software side of things, just a bunch of bloat and
crap that I don't think anyone's gonna ever use.
But it did go ahead and apply this Gateway background.
The system information, all this kind of support stuff is there and looking proper, all the
drivers are good.
Oh yeah, and there was also a bit of an interesting thing where it chose to swap around the logo,
startup animation for Windows 98.
Anyway, I'm pretty happy with how this has turned out.
["Windows 98 passport.mid"] I've always quite liked the built-in WAV Table, MIDI capabilities
of the 128 D here.
Although there are some different options, so for instance.
["Duke Nukem 3D grabbag.mid"] That's just the normal, like default 2 megabyte WAV set.
But if we swap this around from 2 meg to 4 meg.
["Duke Nukem 3D grabbag.mid"] Sounds quite a bit different.
And then you can go to this 8 meg general MIDI.
["Duke Nukem 3D grabbag.mid"] Those are pretty similar but quite different from this one.
["Duke Nukem 3D grabbag.mid"] Honestly, for a lot of DOS games, I prefer the 2 meg one,
but you know, it's up to your preference and what you're trying to make happen on here.
But either way, it's got some options for WAV Table.
[laughs] On the other hand, things like Ad Lib FM Synthesis is really garbage on this
card, but that's just how it goes with these later Sound Blasters, it's just emulating
stuff like, for instance, listen to how bad Commander Keen Episode 4 sounds.
Apologies for the flicker, this'll only take a moment.
["Commander Keen Episode 4 soundtrack"] It's really bad [laughs].
No matter what you try to play, it does not do Ad Lib emulation well whatsoever, but again,
that's just down to really this card and, but yeah, it does some pretty good emulation
of various things of MPU-401:330 as the port.
It's a very compatible card, it's just everything it's compatible with, or tries to emulate,
doesn't sound particularly good.
But the actual Sound Blaster sound effects, PCM and all that, combined with general MIDI,
I mean, it sounds pretty good, I think.
- [Duke Nukem] Damn, those alien bastards are gonna pay for shooting up my ride.
[gun firing] Cool. [gun firing] Holy cow! [explosions]
- [Clint] Yeah, and I have some things that I wanna try.
Because we've got that Voodoo 3 card in there.
So I've got Need for Speed: High Stakes here.
One of my favorites.
And it is from 1999 and specifically, this was the very first Need for Speed game to
support the Voodoo 3 by default.
["Quantum Singularity" by Rom Di Prisco] [beatbox music] [engine revving] Oh yeah.
So I've got everything set to the highest settings.
It is only running on 640x40 resolution, but considering this is a 8 megabyte Voodoo 3
card, that should be just about right.
[engine revving] ["Need for Speed: High Stakes soundtrack"]
- [Game Announcer] Three, two, one, go! [tires squealing] [horn honking] [Clint laughs]
- [Clint] Oops, oops, whoops.
[Clint laughs]
- 316 to central.
- Nope.
- In mission of a white McLaren at the village.
- [Dispatcher] All units be advised.
Be on the lookout for a McLaren at the village.
- [Policeman] 316.
- [Clint] So yeah, not like amazing performance or anything, but pretty darn good and absolutely
playable.
I like to play that all day.
Let's try out something else.
How's about Quake II.
I could go with Quake III, but I wanna play Quake II.
["Quake II soundtrack"] [gun firing] [monsters groaning] [gun firing] So that worked well.
Moving right along to one more game.
I don't know, I just feel like trying a humongous game on here, it feels appropriate.
So we got Putt-Putt Goes To The Moon.
This'll be just a teensy bit less chaotic than Quake II.
["Putt-Putt Goes To The Moon soundtrack"]
- [Announcer] Mr. Firebird invites everyone to come down to take a tour of the Cartown
Fireworks Factory today.
- I better hurry over to the fireworks factory.
- [Clint] Yeah you better.
- Hi Mr. Firebird.
- Welcome, Putt-Putt.
Would you like to help me make a skyrocket? [machine whirring]
- Bright stars.
[machine whirring]
- Ha ho, the squiggly worms are my favorite.
- They're neat.
[Clint laughs]
- [Clint] So pretty much everything works awesomely on here, again, except for the things
that don't [laughs], you know.
Most all of these do.
This is kinda my standard selection of random DOS games.
I always like to put those on this kind of machine.
While I'm thinking about it, got one more thing I wanna do here.
Got some [grunts] extra little goodies I wanna put on the backside of this.
Made some copies of the software restoration stuff that goes with this computer.
Just going to put that in an adhesive sleeve and keep it with the computer by putting it
right about there.
I like to do this with my restorations now.
I've found it a good idea to keep the backup software with the computer like this.
And just because I feel like it, and ego stroking, [chuckles] I've got a LGR adhesive vinyl sticker
here, a nice little decal.
I was thinking about putting a case badge on the front, but it's a very rounded machine,
and there's not really anywhere that a case badge makes a whole lot of sense, so yeah,
why not put this inside, so you know for sure this is an LGR-restored product.
Nice.
I really should get my own warranty stickers made.
Wouldn't that be kinda cool?
I mean there'd be no reason for it, other than it's probably fun.
Well I suppose that's about it for this video, putting back together of this Gateway Essential
450.
Nothing to complex.
Just a pretty dirty machine that needed a little bit of TLC to get back up and looking
and running as it should.
Honestly, I will take an easy project every so often.
[laughs] That's really the biggest reason that I tackled this particular machine for
this particular purpose.
As I mentioned earlier, this is going to be going to a friend of mine, Ian, who runs the
brutalmoose channel on YouTube.
Go check that out if you haven't.
He does some excellent work, very entertaining and bizarre stuff, and he's covered some random
Windows 98 things and such in the past and he was looking for another machine.
I'm like, yeah you know, I've got one, just needs a little work.
So here it is.
Hopefully he enjoys it and hopefully you did, as well, you who are watching, or listening,
or whatever you're doing with this video.
I don't know, man, I'm not gonna question or even think about it, it gets weird sometimes.
But yeah if you enjoyed this kind of thing, well this is the kind of thing that I do here
on LGR.
Not exclusively, but definitely on occasion.
You know, old computers and software and hardware and all that.
It's just my thing.
So if you liked this, feel free to stick around.
There's new videos every week.
And as always, thank you very much for watching.