LGR - Restoring a 1999 Gateway Essential 450 PC

Greetings and welcome to an L G R restoration thing .

And today we've got a late nineties almost classic .

This is a Gateway essential 4 50 from 1999 .

It's a Pentium three 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 , uh hopefully first a little back story 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 kind of sat in storage till 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 the windows .

And I'm like , hey , do you want to get rid of this thing too ?

And she's just like , yeah , you can have it .

So , here it is .

Right .

It's , uh , yeah , look , it's still at 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 computer .

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 , around back though it looks pretty typical , like they maybe have switched down a graphics card or sound card in here because 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 4 50 that was part of uh Gateway's main lineup of computers they had in 1998 99 like the year 2000 .

But according to this print out of the ad here , it looks like the 4 50 was a higher end version of the essential series .

So , yeah , this the specs that this has , but uh , you know , from looking it up , there were a bunch of different variants of the 4 50 .

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 , a GP graphics and sound blaster and , you know , other things that you might want to just , uh , it's just one of those cool PM three systems .

That's why I wanted to pick it up and see what I could do with it .

And you could see there was also some nice upgrades available , you know , Gravis game pad and , uh , a zip drive , Boston acoustics , three piece speaker system DVD ROM .

Yeah .

Anyway , uh , yeah , let's just take a look and see what's actually inside here and get it restored and working again .

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 because , 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 , like , 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 I B M machines .

The , oh , yeah , I forgot about the seal .

Let's , uh , see what we can do without breaking the seal , can we ?

Yeah , whatever .

All right .

Oh , that is kind of nasty .

Hm .

Well , a nice mixture of cobwebs and dust and grime .

Well , I'll have to do a bit of a cleaning on this for sure .

Uh There's an ISA slot down there .

That's kind of cool .

We got five PC I slots .

One A GP slot that looks like a voodoo .

Yeah , it is .

Holy crap .

That's a voodoo three .

That is not what I expected to see in here .

I mean , Gateway did have an O E M situation going on with the voodoo three .

They called it like the 3000 G is the other ones that I have got the sound blaster card here that looks like AC T 58 oh three .

I think that's a 1 28 .

And then we have a modem here which , who cares ?

I probably take that out .

I , I don't know , actually this might be going to someone else , another youtuber who I won't name but his name is Brutal Moose .

And he might not actually need that and may prefer to have Ethernet .

I don't know .

Maybe I , maybe I just won't mess with him and leave it up to him .

But yeah , and here is the processor , it's a PM three 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 I B M like net vistas .

It used a very similar system , uh you know , and maybe it wasn't the best idea but whatever , that's what they did .

And uh yeah , there's a hard disc , let's see what kind of size that is .

Well , capacity is 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 .

But you know what ?

Let's just go ahead and turn it on because other than being dirty , it looks ok , I'm not seeing like bulging caps or anything weird leaky garbage or anything .

So , 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 .

That thing is so gross .

Look at all this .

Ok .

Well , let's just turn it on and see what happens .

Yeah , there's the voodoo 3 1000 G .

Let's see what we got here in the system set up .

All right .

So that is a 450 megahertz PM three as the model number insinuated .

And that's what I figured , but you never know .

Actually 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 .

Yeah , so far .

So good .

Nothing exploding .

It does smell like , uh , not , not good .

What is this gateway ?

Go back , here we go .

I got Windows 98 going , yeah , that old cobwebs and dust smell .

It is only growing more increased as the fans do their thing and everything warms up .

All right .

Well , actually a pretty quick boot , all things considered at least to this point .

And , yeah , there we go .

I mean .

Oh , yeah .

Yeah .

So , uh , desktop management wasn't exactly a priority for a lady who had this in the past , but that's ok .

She's like in her seventies .

So .

Right .

Wow , this is Windows 98 with uh a lot of crap going on .

What all is it even loading ?

Oh , my word .

That poor hard drive is just wants to die and it's just sitting here .

Nothing is , 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 , uh older lady , she's very nice .

Um , but , you know , getting older didn't need our computers anymore .

And so , yeah , let's see what is actually on this thing .

This is what I'm mostly curious about right here .

Ok .

So we do have 64 Megs of Ram .

It looks like I did have a zip drive at some point , but no longer does .

Uh Yeah , all pretty expected stuff here .

Let's see what we got .

Oh my .

Well , Microsoft and Tele point drivers , shortcuts to shortcuts to shortcuts .

Classic Spy About and d another classic game publishing .

Who knows what installed that , uh , real player rand mcnally Trip maker in 1996 there used to be some sort of , I don't know , card game something .

Another , probably this gateway go back 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 .

Ok , hard disk space .

It is .

That's a 10 gig drive .

Ok .

So it's a little more than I expected .

I think I saw a lot of them were configured with like 6.4 .

Yeah , I mean , it's just standard uh 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 , right ?

So I know that one thing that Gateway did is they have the restore C DS .

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 , 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 C DS back then .

I don't know if this is the exact one that went with this exact computer or not .

I've got it's just a ton of these .

I've 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 2nd edition CD installation .

And then the restore disc here shouldn't 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 had to clean this .

This is , it's horrendous .

Um It's really bad .

Yeah , like just this voodoo card alone .

This is um , well , I haven't seen this kind of dust accumulation since doing work for like various I T things .

Uh I'm trying to keep this intact because it's kind of impressive .

Look at that .

I think it's safe to say this has not been cleaned or open since 1999 or thereabouts .

This is really all right .

I need a mask and we're gonna take this outside .

All right .

Just gonna blow everything out using a compressor and a vacuum here .

No , sucky .

Only blowy .

Well , thank goodness I had a mask on for that .

That was terrible .

This little uh sticker came off here in tech .

I don't know if that's an original Gateway sticker or not , but , all right , I 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 .

I'll say just a bunch of your normal kind of grossness where it was used the most still though , even after a brief bit of wiping , you can already see we're getting some go , it's going over the outside of it quickly with this sort of water vinegar mix .

You're definitely seeing a few stubborn spots already .

Why are there airplanes every two seconds ?

And there are a lot of sharp edges on this case , which , I mean , it's pretty difficult 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 because honestly I just don't care that much .

Uh , this is not , you know , some rare valuable worthy of museum kind of piece .

But , uh , I'm 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 .

Oh , come on , airplanes .

Go away .

What are you doing ?

The fifth fly by ?

Ah , and we're just going over with a bit of alcohol .

It just me or does that look like it's , um , got a little bit of heat damage ?

Well , they will run it through its paces .

Once we get it all reinstalled and such , you see down there on the bottom it's still pretty gross .

Oh , yeah .

Hm .

Oh , yeah , those would have been cuts .

Thank you .

Gloves .

Uh , yeah , the more I think about it , the more I don't want to keep this hard drive .

So I think I might replace this with like an S D card solution or something like that .

So I'll go ahead and take that thing out of here .

Oh , there's another screw .

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 .

Here we go .

What happened ?

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 , a back up of sorts and then I'm going to install .

Oh , my goodness .

Is it that airplane again ?

It is .

Seriously .

This guy just got his pilot's license .

They're like , come on , man , you're like right above the house , fly somewhere else anyway , as I was going to say , I'm just gonna use one of these S D card , uh S D I two ID E S D to ID E adapters .

Got a power thing there that , you know , can use the four pin from either a floppy desk 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 a while 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 .

It's not a big deal .

It'll be fine .

We're in here .

So we'll go ahead and take a look at that Ram .

I haven't seen one of these in a while .

This is a stick of Hyundai Ram PC 100 classic used to have , uh , I believe it's a compact .

It had a Hyundai Ram like that 64 whole megs .

Amazing .

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 three if I was to upgrade C P U maybe , but it's gonna leave it as is .

And yeah , I just gotta go over some of these little corner spots with a brush here just to get the last bits of stupid crap .

Ok .

Uh , I guess I should take care of that battery .

All right .

I 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 .

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 are you gonna fly so low over my house , in particular , as much as I enjoy working on nineties computers .

I hate this part of it .

I talk about one of the , 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 and the stupid caddies and trays and stuff , they can all go straight down .

Ok .

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 .

Uh , and that's really the whole idea .

I'm just kind of doing this because I can't .

Oh , I missed a spot .

Listen .

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 and , yeah , that's it .

Really ?

Ok .

So as far as this thing goes , I don't believe , yeah , there's no jumpers on here .

So , plug in the ID E cable and then , yeah , we'll just use four pen Molex for power that should be pretty much it for that .

I don't know what I'm gonna do with that yet , but I'll set it there for now .

You got AC B analog audio right here in the sound card .

Can't screw it .

We'll put the modem back in there too .

And last , but definitely not least our voodoo 3 1000 G and hopefully it's fine in case you're wondering why I don't have like this mounted in our front or back drive bay .

Uh , 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 .

Um , if you saw my windows 98 Capture PC build , the bracket is too far over that way , ends up bunching up against things on 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 , uh , it just kind of sucks and whatever it'll be fine in here for now .

I just want to get it up and running and there is our airplane friend again .

I swear .

I swear , let's go ahead and get the front of this cleaned up just a little bit more because it's still kind of grimy .

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 .

Like , all things considered this is coming together .

Nice and clean .

I haven't even had to break out the magic eraser yet .

There's like one spot over here .

I probably will but they're not , I mean , this is , I mean , that'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 .

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 .

Um , except for nope , it's all plastic in the whole case externally anyway , like , obviously inside there's a metal cage but , you know , late nineties 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 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 have 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 .

Here we go .

We , uh , I like it .

Ok , let me give it to one more wipe to get some of that residue off of there .

And , uh , 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 S D hard disk alternative .

And there we go , it detected that just fine .

Which awesome .

I've been really impressed with these S D adapters that are out there .

I mean , they're pretty brain dead or , 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 kind of work and we're gonna boot it from this distance .

See what happens .

All right .

Got the CD detected .

Sweet .

I forgot .

I'm on an S S K keyboard .

Let's switch .

All right .

So it does actually have it on there already .

I guess that means I don't have to do crap .

All right .

Well , seems to be reading discs .

Ok .

It's still probably gonna be a good idea to just clean out the inside of that thing anyway .

I noticed it had one of those , uh , like foam edges around the disc 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 .

Uh , we'll see if we can get windows going .

Yeah , scan disk .

You , you scan that S D card with nothing on it , see what you find ?

All right .

Windows 98 set up , go with custom because that's the way I roll .

Oh , and restarting , that's always a good sign .

Yay .

Well , this is not gonna be my machine .

So , actually does he use Pascal Case ?

Er , 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 , uh , run the restore CD for the gateway applications and drivers and all that crap , I think .

And that should be about it .

Um , then we'll try some games .

Wow , that was a quick boot , 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 .

I love those 16 color graphics .

So , yeah .

Uh , it's all good though .

Pretty much .

So .

Uh , that's , that's good stuff .

Cool .

Well , let's go ahead and get that restore CD going and , uh , yeah .

Oh , look at all this stuff .

So , instead of clipping , we have , uh , cowboy , I suppose I'm here to help you out and all right .

So we got , uh , yeah , all the hardware and the software and , you know , all sorts of cool .

I mean , we're pretty much just gonna do all this stuff , but let's go ahead and do the , uh , software for now .

Like , I'm going to replace some of these drivers with like , better ones anyway .

So , you know , whatever , I guess .

But we'll just install it by default first and see how it goes .

Yay graphics .

So , we have 800 by 616 bits .

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 , 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 .

Uh , 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 .

I've always quite liked the built in wave table midi capabilities of the 1 28 D here .

Although there are some different options .

So for instance , that's just the normal , like default two megabyte wave set .

But if we swap this around from two meg to four meg sounds quite a bit different and then you can go to this eight meg uh General Midi .

Those are pretty similar but quite different from this one .

Honestly , for a lot of dos games , I prefer the two meg one but you know that it's , 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 wave table .

Uh On the other hand , things like ad lib F M synthesis is , is really garbage on this card .

But um that's just how it goes with these later sound blasters .

It's just emulating stuff like for instance , listen to how bad Commander Ken episode four sounds , apologies for the flicker .

This will only take a moment what it's really bad 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 um but yeah , it does some pretty good emulation of various things .

MP U four oh 13 30 of the port .

And yeah , it's , 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 like sound effects PC M and all that and combined with General Midi , I mean , it sounds pretty good .

I think you going to take or shooting up will become , yeah , I got some things that I want to try because we got that voodoo three card in there .

So we've got need for speed high stakes here .

Uh One of my favorites and it is from 1999 and specifically this is the very first need for speed game to support the Voodoo three by default .

Oh yeah .

So I've got everything set to the highest settings .

It is only running at 6 40 by 40 resolution .

But considering this is a eight megabyte voodoo three card , that should be just about right .

321 .

Go tricky texture .

Oops .

Oops .

What ?

No .

So yeah , not like amazing performance or anything but pretty darn good and absolutely playable .

Well , I like to play that all day .

Let's try out something else .

How's about Quake Two ?

I could go with Quake Three but I wanna play Quake Two .

So that works 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 pot putt goes to the moon .

It will be just a teensy bit less chaotic than quick two .

Mr Firebird invites everyone to come down to take a tour of the car town Fireworks Factory today .

I better hurry over to the fireworks factory .

Yeah , you better .

Hi , Mr Firebird , welcome .

Would you like to help me make our skyrocket ?

Right ?

Stars .

Yeah , the squiggly worms are my favorite .

So uh pretty much everything works awesomely on here .

Again , except for the things that don't , you know , because , uh , most of all of these do like kind of a standard selection of random dos games .

I always like to put those on this kind of machine while I'm thinking about it .

I got one more thing I wanna do here .

Got some extra little goodies .

I'm gonna 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 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 , I've got a L G R adhesive vinyl sticker here .

A nice little decal .

I was thinking about putting a case badge in 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 L G R restored product .

Nice .

I really should get my own warranty stickers made .

Wouldn't that be kind of cool ?

I mean , there'd be no reason for it other than uh that's probably fun .

Well , I suppose that's about it for this video putting back together this Gateway Essential 4 50 .

Nothing too complex .

Just a pretty dirty machine that needed a little bit of T L C to get back up and looking and running as it should .

Honestly , I will take an easy project every so often .

That's really the biggest reason that I tackle 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 a brutal moose channel on youtube , but 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 gets weird sometimes .

But yeah , if you enjoyed this kind of thing .

Well , this is the kind of thing that I do here on L G R , 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 like this , feel free to stick around there , new videos every week .

And as always , thank you very much for watching .