Dell OptiPlex gets multimedia upgrade

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

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

It's a good day when Retrospector78 uploads!

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

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

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

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!

Brings back so many good memories from back in the day

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

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

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.

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...

Nice video thanks. That sound cards box is just wow!

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.

Excellent video! I love the old Dell machines. Very well built.

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.

loved the upgrade format. keep up the good work

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.

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.

great job on turning this nice machine around......i like it alot! if i ever wanted a dos windows gaming rig..you are the guy to go to! wish that we lived closer!...good job!