The grey plastic side panels and front bezel are dinged up a bit. I may repaint them at some point, but other this issue the system is super clean.
Specs:
Pentium 4 2.66GHz
1.5 GB ram
250GB SATA hard drive w/IDE adapter
Radeon x1650 256MB vram
Onboard sound (SoundMax)
DVD and floppy drives
I didn’t think I’d ever finish restoring this dingy, yellowed Gateway! The model is MFATXSTL KTH 300LE.
It took nearly a week to retrobright the front bezel. That’s how bad it was. Unfortunately, there is a little marbeling here and there, but it’s the best I could do with a big plastic bag and some professional grade peroxide. I think it’s acceptable compared to what I started with.
The floppy drive was toast, so I had to pick one up from eBay. The replacement drive reads and writes but can’t format disks. I have no clue why. Has anyone else ran into this issue or have suggestions to fix this?
I don’t have an IDE hard drive and only had on hand a 2.5” 120GB SATA drive. The HDD caddy has a good tool less locking mechanism, but there was no way for me to mount a 2.5” drive with no screw holes in the caddy. It’s pretty crammed between the CD and floppy drives, too, so I opted to use a 2.5”’to 3.5”’SATA adapter caddy and mount it below the hard drive cage. I had to make it extend down a bit below the caddy to clear the motherboard’s floppy connector. It was a pain figuring out a mounting solution!
The motherboard only has PCI slots. I tested a bench of PCI GPUs and settled on a Ragy Fury Pro I picked up awhile back. I played a few games to ensure it wasn’t as bad as the S3 Virge/DX I tried initially. The desktop image I posted shows different cards I tested along with their benchmark scores in 3DMark 99 Max.
There was a lot of rust and corrosion on the bottom of the case as well as on the metal guides where the side panel slides on. I used some 2 in 1 rust converter after sanding and some steel wool work. I added two missing feet once the case bottom was nicely restored.
The USB ports on the motherboard rear do not work correctly. The front USB ports work fine. There is no physical damage to the rear USB ports, so I’m at a loss why those ports don’t work right. I installed a PCI USB 2.0 card as a workaround.
It was definitely a journey getting this Gateway system restored, but I think it turned out pretty well.
Specs:
Celeron 1.2GHz (Tualatin)
384MB ram
120GB hard drive
Rage Fury Pro PCI
Sound Blaster Live CT4870
USB 2.0 card
Windows 98 SE
This PC provided by a fellow Redditor who was gracious enough to ship it to me - thanks HS! It had some heavy rust on the case bottom, but at least the internals were all good other than a ton for dirt and grime. I used some 2 in 1 rust converter paint after doing a lot on sanding.
Specs:
AMD K7-650 slot A CPU
256MB ram (upgraded from 128MB)
GeForce FX 5200 (upgraded from Trident 9750)
NC100 network card
Gateway Connexant 56K modem
Phillips DVD/CD RW drive
Lite-On CD drive
3.5” floppy
I picked up this Sony VAIO PCV-LX800 just over 7 years ago from a thrift store. It was in really rough shape and was missing ram and a hard drive. Also, the CD drive wouldn’t read any CD. The system would post, but the fans were super loud but clunky. I finally got around to restoring this system and am happy with the results.
The CD drive had to be replaced with the same model because of the proprietary bezel and extra mounting holes on the bottom that are used for mounting screws used to raise the drive up above the motherboard and lock in place via special plastic brackets.
The hard drive also requires special screws to mount the drive in a proprietary ABS plastic frame that clips on the top of the CD drive. Luckily the frame came with the unit.
I kept the original 60mm CPU fan but oiled and cleaned it up. The only other fan (and the loudest) in this system is in the PSU and is used to blow air through the PSU and out through the back of the case. I replaced it with a Noctua 60mm x 25mm 3pin fan.
I found the restore CDs on archive.org and was able to return the system to its original state with working OS and full set of drivers.
Here are the specs for this PCV-LX800:
Pentium III 800EB
512MB PC133 ram (256MB x 2)
Seagate 40GB hard drive
Sony CX140E CD drive
SiS 300 integrated graphics (AGP 4x)
SiS integrated audio
3 USB ports, SD card reader, PCMCIA, AV port, standard sound ports
Windows ME with all the apps and bloatware installed from the official restore CDs
This system only has two full height PCI slots (no AGP), so I’m figuring out my options for a PCI graphics card. Something has to be better than the SiS graphics that is limited to DirectX 7 and has poor performance in most games. Maybe I will throw in a SB Live, too.
It’s a compact desktop system that strangely has no PS2 ports. I had no issue, however, using a Logitech mouse and a modern USB keyboard with it. It surely is one of the stranger systems in my collection, but at least she’s working great now!