Thread by @RetroTechChris

I bought this Packard Bell Multimedia 601 at last week's Northern Virginia swap meet. It had a bit of a transformation, and it is now all set up too! Let's talk about it in a 🧵 here!

First of all, when I picked up this thing, it was DIRTY, like REALLY DIRTY. But that is something we can fix.

I got started with some glass cleaner and also use a melamine pad to clean it up a bit. With a little bit of elbow grease, I think it turned out nice!

Looking at it though, I figured it could use some retr0briting for a few of the pieces. So I got started on that, since I figured it would take a while!

Oh, I should mention, getting to the point where I could remove the power button and the reset button to retr0brite, we uncovered a lot more dirt 😂. I think this PC had a good run back in the day.

Let's have a look at the internals next. But first, here's a "sticker" that the seller placed on it. As we can see, it is tested and 100% working (foreshadowing!). Oh, by the way, I paid 10 bucks for this PC! I couldn't resist at that price!

Okay, now the internals. Peering inside is a little difficult until we remove the additional metal shields, which we will do in a minute. But we can see this has the Intel VX chipset. I am not sure what the story is with covering the PC slot with a sticker, but whatever works 😂

This system has a Packard Bell PB810/820 motherboard. And the video chip? It's a S3 Trio64V2/DX, which will be great for Windows 3.11 and Windows '95!

Let's power this baby up and run MemTest86+. It has 32MB installed. I'd like to upgrade the memory to its 128MB max, but we have to use 64MB modules to do that. Naturally I gave away a bunch of these last week, so off to eBay I went, we'll install these when they arrive!

This system doesn't have a HDD, so I'll pop in a 10GB Maxtor drive. However, the BIOS will limit us to 8.4GB, but that is ok! I went ahead and got some partitions on here for DOS/Win3.1x and Win95 installs, using BootIt Bare Metal of course!

Next, let's get a network card in this thing so that we can transfer some files. This Kingston KNE-120TX card will do the trick. I had to remove the front fascia and the left metal rail to easily install the card, and we indeed found more dirt 😂

Let's test the CD-ROM. It's a Goldstar, I already know how this is going to go... I tried cleaning the laser lens, no luck. Remember how I said this machine was 100% tested earlier? Okay 😂. Maybe it needed "MORE than 100% testing"!

After trying out FOUR optical drives that I had on hand, I finally found one that worked. This drive is out of my Compaq Deskpro 6000 and it will do for now.

Here we are, all put back together. Looking sharp for a $10 PC (well, $20 when the memory gets here 😂)

I thought I would attack that peeling sticker with some contact adhesive. I wasn't careful enough and damaged it a little when I cleaned up excess adhesive with some rubbing alcohol. So, I touched it up "poorly" with a sharpie. Oh well, I tried 😂

Oh! Here's the back of the PC. Apologies, this thread wasn't planned out like I usually do, so we're a little less organized today 😂

Alright, I am happy with the hardware, let's get to the software. I created a MS LAN Manager boot disk and used the network card to transfer over some installers! From there, I kicked up the Windows for Workgroups 3.11 installer, and got networking configured there too!

I also found some video drivers for the S3 Trio64V2/DX video card. Drivers installed without a hitch. Just look at that desktop now!!

Next I targeted sound drivers for the Crystal CS4237B sound chip. Oh did this give me problems! But fortunately I remembered the fix for it: after install, we have to add a "/O" to the driver in config.sys. Voila! That fixed my problems!

Since the sound drivers were SUCH A PAIN, let's at least listen to a rendition of canyon.mid to enjoy the fruit of our labors!

That concludes our Win3.1x setup. I'll post my autoexec.bat and config.sys for the interested. But let's move on to Win95! I started out by using Win3.11 networking to copy the Win95 installer files over.

From there we were off to the races with Win95. Installation was smooth, and from there we were greeted with a nice desktop and tons of yellow exclamation marks 😂. Let's fix those.

I started with network, and then moved onto video (not shown). That bigger desktop is much improved!

Let's take stock of our yellow exclamation marks. Okay, audio, USB, and modem. I started with USB and installed XUSBSUPP, which did the trick.

Next I went with audio, and after much cursing, I eventually used some drivers from Dell to set up the audio 😂. What is the deal with audio on this thing anyway? That's TWO OSes that have given me trouble.

Okay, taking stock, just the modem now. I found some drivers for the US Robotics Winmodem, and we are looking good! I tested it out in HyperTerm to see if we could communicate with the modem, and indeed we can!

You're still here? I admire your patience! Anyway, this is the end of the thread. No yellow exclamation marks, and Win95 is happily installed. I love this little $10 PC. Thanks for following along!

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