Dell OptiPlex gets multimedia upgrade

Don't forget to enable DMA on the HDD and CD-ROM.

The rattling sound of these old Western Digital Caviar drives brings me some really good memories...

It's a good day when Retrospector78 uploads!

what a joy it is to see perfectly capable machines like these in action (and getting upgrades)

I agree, nothing like installing 95 or 98 on original hardware. Way more fun than new stuff.

Installing Win95 from DOS 6.22 is absolutely fine. I often use a 6.22 disk as my generic “Das-boot” disk. I have had the same problem you were having, but I seem to remember it being a bad SCSI driver, or an issue with the Plug n Play config manager having trouble assigning resources. Something like that. I bet if you had stripped down the configs, and maybe removed any non-essential cards, it would’ve been fine. Might also have been a disk manager in the MBR. OH! No, I remember now — there’s a buggy version of emm386 that would have issues with ... something. I’m having trouble remembering what exactly triggered it, but there was a KB article that said you needed to upgrade to a later version. I think I ended up using one from MS Visual C++ 1.52 or something, as it was later than the ones bundled with DOS.

That original animated Win95 bootscreen is still the best with the nice gradient and bright colours. And it allowed for some awesome animated 3rd party ones too...

seeing this computer brought back some old memories, my school in like 1-4 grade was positively full of these lol

Very nice Win98 machines that have onboard ATI RAGE for early 3D games. Once thing to keep in mind is the custom ATX connector which prevents you from upgrading the PSU which is 145W stock. An adaptor exists that converts the ATX connector so a regular PSU can be used, otherwise you run the risk of damaging the motherboard.

Brings back so many good memories from back in the day

very cool, you should apply this format (overview, base, maxed out upgrades) to more systems!

When I see a new RetroSpector video I know it will be a very good episode :D

The whole experience is so much about sound, smell and haptics to me. I am currently wrapping my head around how to set up and test some 20 SCSI harddrives that have piled up and it is absolutely tedious. but still, at every reboot the sounds of the floppy drive springing to life and loading MHDD makes me a little bit happy.

Since 2009 I like to install those old OSes in Virtualbox. I have all Windows releases from 1.04 (1986) to 11 (2022) including the NT releases :) On the Linux side I have all Ubuntu LTS releases; the first release 4.10 and my first release 5.04 :) I have absolutely no space for 17 old PCs running Windows. However I installed my ancient VMs on the last 500GB of an 1TB HDD and of course they run with one CPU. I even have no space for my first two PCs; an own-build 486DX66 dual booting Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and OS2/Warp nor for my Philips P3105, an XT clone with MS-DOS 6.0. My 2 oldest still running VMs were installed and activated in April 2010 (Windows XP Home NL and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS). They survived 3 Desktop PCs and 4 CPUs (2003 HP d530 with a Pentium 4 HT; 2008 HP dc5850 with a Phenom X3 8600 upgraded to a Phenom II X4 B97 and my 2nd 2019 own-build with a Ryzen 3 2200G). Another reason I prefer VMs, they live forever, if backed up properly :) I still use that 2003 HP d530 SFF, I kept the parts and moved those to a Compaq Evo Tower with a Windows 98SE activation sticker. The PC has the Pentium 4 HT (1C2T; 3.0GHz); 1.5GB DDR (400MHz) and 4 HDDs in total 1.21TB (2x IDE; 2x SATA-1; 2x 3.5"; 2x 2.5"; 1x 250GB and 3x 320GB). The system is still used for ~1 hour/week as backup server. It runs the latest FreeBSD 13.1 with OpenZFS 2.1.4 with all storage lz4 compressed. The tower has 2 external cables 1 Gbps Ethernet and Power. Another fun project to use an outdated PC with the latest software for a still useful task. The transfer speed is 200Mbps due to a 95% load on one CPU thread :)

This is the first time I have watched a retro computer video about a computer that I used on a regular basis. Mine came from an office environment, so it didn't have a sound card installed when I got mine either. I later picked up a p2 era optiplex on eBay in the early 2000's that was my main computer for a while too. I really liked the style of those cases especially.

I love how the Quake audio is drowning him out as he drones on about resolutions back in the day. 😆

Waiting for everything to happen truly is humbling.

I have a couple of these (the GX1 variant) and I originally had them with windows FLP but after watching this video I simply had to load W98 SE

Great video! Really enjoy seeing your restoration/repair videos of these old PCs. The boxed software that you show with these PCs really adds to that throwback feeling. Who knew these PCs be so collectible over 25 years later? I have a "retro network" like this and hold regular LAN parties (three IBM Aptiva Pentium PCs, and a custom-built AT-class PC I built 23 years ago) for mostly IPX net games. Transferring large files via the network still makes retro gaming much easier with these older machines, even with bandwidth/speed limitations. I love that collection of old SoundBlaster cards...definitely keep those!

Great video. You sir are a proper nerd. I long for this era where technology was mostly used for productivity with none of the social media nonsense.