Thread by @RetroTechChris

Oh my, what do we have here? An ultra-budget eMachines T1100 from the early 2000s? Why.. yes! And it's even in nice shape! Let's explore it a bit, and see if we can make it do something useful. Time for a 🧵

On the front of the machine, we can see that it proudly proclaims its model number. And its previous owner proudly updated the specs after a memory upgrade 😂. CD-RW, AGP graphics, 56K modem, 256MB memory, 20GB HDD, and.. a 1.0 GHz Celeron, really, what more do you need? 😂

I'll tell you what more we need... ALL OF THE DOCS! Clearly this WAS a proud owner. What a time capsule!

And just in case you needed any more evidence that this machine was loved, look at this: the drive cover door is still intact! I am guessing this it the only T1100 left on the PLANET with both of its front doors still intact.

But wait, there's more! We have the full suite of restore CDs. Great. We'll get to that in a minute.

Alright, enough of that. Let's open it up. Wow, just look at the little power supply. Ooh, we have Wake on LAN support, wasn't expecting that. Sadly, no Crystal audio chip. And.. uh oh... this is from the bad cap era... and we have at least one on its way out..

Oh, forgot to mention, we also have the keyboard for this little beast. It's about what you'd expect.

We're going to get to disassembly, so first I popped out this little Conexant modem. We won't do anything with it for now.

Let's look at the drives. The CD-ROM is a Samsung apparently. Good luck finding a replacement with this front cover. And the FDD is a Trigem.

To get to the FDD, I pulled the front panel. And that was... fun. Plugging those connectors back in for reassembly is a pain. I gave the wires a little slack when I eventually did that. But I'm getting ahead of myself again 🤣

Removing the motherboard was a bit of a pain, thanks to one clever standoff under the disk drive. But with the right amount of persuasion, I was able to pop it out.

My reason for getting the mobo out was intentional: despite having the manual, I couldn't really identify it. After a closer look, I was able to identify this board as a TriGem Anaheim3 (based on silkscreen and the BIOS label). It has an Intel 810e chipset.

Let's get this thing booted up and use the system restore media. And.. check it out, the restore uses Symantec Ghost. That's awesome! The restore image is spread across three CDs basically. Piece of cake.

Time for first boot. I had to take a clip of that "first WinXP boot Zen audio" which I love! So soothing.

Let's get this thing on the network, we'll use a 3Com PCI card. And, yes, I'll be attaching the Wake on LAN cable!

Alright, now let's make this thing do something useful. I installed Winamp, and configured ProtoWeb, and launched retro SHOUTcast. Great, now this PC can be an "internet radio"

Now let's try Wake on LAN. I configured it in the BIOS, and turned on the ability to wake up the computer from standby. And it works! I couldn't get wake up from a complete power off to work, but this is good enough for now.

Well, anyway, that was fun. Even old budget computers can be useful! Given specs, this would also make a decent Win98 rig, and it's not a terrible WinXP rig. Thanks for following along.

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