[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.