Our 25 Year Old Family PC Was More Interesting Than I Thought

My Family PC

This is an old family PC of mine from around the year 2000 - so 25 years ago, if you can believe that - when I was about 16 years old. It’s a slot A AMD Athlon system, so it’s quite an interesting machine in its own right - but more importantly to me, it’s one that holds an awful lot of nostalgia because this was actually the last PC that I ever built for my family. After this, they moved on to laptops and I went to college and was earning some money part-time - and the next PC I built was in the year 2004, a Pentium 4 HT system, specifically for the launch of Half-Life 2, but that’s probably a story for another time.

Anyway, around seven or eight years ago, I liberated this from my parents’ attic, cleaned it all up, blasted all of the dust out of it, stuck it on a shelf and vowed to do something interesting with it one day.

Well, I’m very pleased to report that that day has finally come.

A Look Around The Outside

So before we get this fired up, let’s take a look at what we’re actually dealing with here - and as mentioned, I did give it a good clean all of those years ago, but it does have the usual scuffs and scrapes and things that you might expect of a system this age. Also, the case badge seems to be long missing. I can’t remember what was on here - I think it was a Linux Penguin, like a Tux badge or something. Some of my earliest experiments with Linux were on this machine, but anyway, that doesn’t matter.

We have a DVD-ROM drive as you can see - and a CD writer, a 40x12x48x - so that does CD-RWs as well. Dual drives, which was quite the extravagance at the time, and probably not used to copy CDs and that kind of thing. Absolutely not.

And as we might expect from a turn of the century machine, this also still has a lovely floppy drive in it, which is great - and I will say this case actually opens up in quite an interesting way, but we’ll take a look at that in a second. Let’s have a look around the back first.

So very much a product of its time, although still some stuff that we will recognize from PCs today - for example, our ATX power supply here, which of course is still the standard today, 25 years later, and some PS/2 ports as well for the keyboard and the mouse. Considered to be a higher end gaming feature in this day and age, but yeah, very much ubiquitous in the 90s and the early 2000s - and of course the USB ports as well, which we still have nowadays, although this PC only has two of them. I think these are probably USB 1.1. We’ll have to have a look at that once we get this booted up.

A hole here for the ethernet - you know, the network connector - not quite sure why we would’ve got this backplate with this motherboard, as it evidently isn’t the correct one for the board. Probably a factory second or a return or something like that, knowing my dad - he always had a bit of an eye for a bargain.

Moving on from that, we have two serial ports here - 9-pin serial ports here - of course, COM1 and COM2, which you could have also used for your mouse, but we were probably still using it for an external modem at this point because we lived out in the sticks and were still on dialup until into the early 2000s.

Parallel printer port - of course, absolutely essential at the time - and onboard audio here. So we’ve got the standard audio connectors and the game port for the joystick, or of course for your MIDI input and output.

Moving on to the PCI cards we have, of course, a graphics card here - I can’t remember what graphics card was in this system, but we’ll find out in a second when we pop the lid. However, what is noteworthy is that it does have this s-video connector on it, so you could actually plug this into your TV - your standard definition, CRT TV at the turn of the century - and you can actually watch the output from the PC on your TV. Or in my case, I remember actually downloading some very low quality, very low bitrate episodes of stuff like South Park and using this to transfer them to VHS for later viewing, which went about as well as you would expect.

Yes, I was a bit of a strange kid when I was 16…

But moving swiftly on, we have a network card here - I don’t remember having a network at home, but evidently that’s found its way in there somehow at some point over the years - and also an empty slot, which I remember had a WinTV card in it, which was a TV tuner card, and we specifically bought that to try to transfer some old family videos onto- well, basically to digitize them and to try to transfer them onto Video CD. But I believe that project ended up being pretty much abandoned because you know, the file sizes were absolutely insanely massive and, you know, just PCs of the time didn’t have the processing power to handle compressing hours and hours worth of video.

So yeah, I do remember that project, but no idea where that card has gone, sadly.

What’s Inside?

So I mentioned earlier that this case opens in quite an interesting way and I appreciate this isn’t unique to this machine - I have seen others where where the front pops off like this. Let me just see if I can… there we go… but quite unusual I think for kind of a budget PC case of its day. Indeed, maybe it wasn’t a budget case, maybe it was a higher end case, I’m not quite sure. But the front pops off like that and then this is all toolless and this actually slides off this way - and then the drive cages and things in here, they’re also toolless and they just kind of slide out.

I’m going to leave those in for now, or should I?

I tell you what, let’s just slide these ‘cause they’re on these rails - I’ll just slide these a little bit out of the way. I’m going to leave the optical drives in just because we’ve already seen what they are and they’re not all that interesting, we’re more interested in the internals here.

But yeah, quite a nice case actually!

I’ll just pop that up there out of the way. Haha. Very nice, very nice indeed: “Copyright 1990 AMD” that says on there, AMD Athlon processor. No indication as to, oh- A0650NPR24B - so yeah, a 650MHz Slot A Athlon CPU - so these Slot One and Slot A CPUs were actually pretty short-lived in the grand scheme of things - I think the Pentium II and then the Pentium III, and then of course AMD copied and came up with their own slot and then we went back to sockets after that. Bit boring, really. These were far more exciting - and as we can see, we have the Cyber Cooler - a great brand of cooler on there.

That’s just the network card. Oh, it’s a 3Com 3C905 - so yeah, pretty bog-standard network card from back in the day, a bit of a workhorse that, but yeah, actually a pretty decent bit of kit.

Graphics card next - and this is AGP as we can see - so what is this?

It’s a GeForce 2 MX - so, yeah, one of the early GeForce cards. Nvidia, of course. I don’t think these had a great reputation, did they, back in the day? I don’t really remember. I seem to remember it running stuff like Half-Life perfectly well, and you know, Deus Ex and The Sims and that kind of thing.

Now, no hard drive in here, which is unfortunate - that’s evidently been pilfered at some point for some other project. But what motherboard do we have here?

So it’s an ASUS - or ASUS if you prefer - K7V motherboard. Of course, it’s a slot A. We’ve got three RAM slots here, only one of which is populated - we’ll find out how much RAM we have in a moment.

That AGP slot, as mentioned. Five PCI slots - so this was very much a post-ISA and the ubiquitous 2000s AMR or “Audio Modem Riser” slot, which I think I’ve only ever seen one of these with an actual card in it over the years, which was a WinModem type thing. Very much cut down interface specifically for modems and sound cards.

And one more thing that I’ve just remembered that I just wanted to show to you, which is this case’s party trick, and if we just remove these two screws here, as you can see, there is this mysterious handle here, but if we pull this and then pull on this…

…I’ve still got some cables and things connected, so we might be able to not be able to get this fully out, but that just pops off there I think…

…Ah, there we go - so as you can see, this motherboard tray actually comes out completely, which makes changing the motherboard very easy indeed - or at least if you can untangle all of the wires and stuff, which I won’t be doing. I think this is far enough.

But yeah, evidently some kind of quite premium case this for its time - and I can’t see any manufacturer’s markings or brand name on it anywhere - so hey, if you’re familiar with this case, maybe let me know what it is down in the comments, but, yeah, I think it’s about time I put this back together and finally got it booted up.

Ah, I remember - no hard drive, which is not going to be much use to anyone!

So I do have a big box of old IDE hard drives, which I could have used, but when I went rummaging, I actually found this, which is an IDE to CompactFlash adapter, which fits into one of these slots at the back - so that’s what I’m going to be using - and I’ve also found a couple of 8GB cards, which should be plenty for what we want to do with this machine.

First Power On Test

Oh…

Ah!

Hmm, well… There’s a light on in there…

Yeah. Well, I guess they can’t all be winners, but as explained at the beginning of this video, this PC is very dear to me indeed, and I would very much like to get this back up and running - with the original hardware all intact if at all possible - so this certainly isn’t the last you’ll be seeing of this machine.

Consider this part one in a repair series and hey, we haven’t had one of those on the channel in quite a while, so I guess that’s a good thing. Just to recap the stuff that I have tried, just in case anyone wants to kind of chip in with any help or suggestions down in the comments, that would be very much appreciated:

I did try a different power supply, of course, the obvious thing, and no signs of life despite that green LED being on, on the motherboard. It was at that point I decided to try some stuff off camera and I took everything out and reseated everything - so I took the CPU, the RAM, all of the cards out and reseated those, made sure they were all nice and firmly in place, but still no difference - and I also disconnected the power switch as well and just tried shorting that out with a screwdriver, just the header on the motherboard, just in case it was a problem with the switch - sometimes it’s something very simple like that, but no, still completely and utterly dead to the world, which is quite disappointing.

But as I say - quite exciting ‘cause hopefully we’ll get a repair series out of this. Now, one thing I will say is that I had a motherboard of a similar vintage quite recently, which had exactly the same symptoms and I actually recapped it and that brought it back to life - so I suspect some of these electrolytic caps might be a little bit dubious.

So what I’m going to do is get this board out next, of course, get those caps out, get any that look suspicious, get them tested, and then get some replacements ordered and hopefully that should make for quite an interesting part two.

So thank you ever so much for joining me - I hope you’ve enjoyed taking a look around this hardware and hearing the story behind it, and this certainly won’t be the last that you’ll be seeing of this PC. So big thanks as always to my supporters on Patreon and Ko-Fi, and of course my YouTube Channel Members as well. They get videos a little bit early and also ad-free. But that’s all I have for you for this particular video - so hopefully I’ll see you in the next one.