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 have one more ISA sound card that I have been meaning to test, and it's kindof neat! Let's get it tested, time for a 🧵!
First, here's the card. It's a Labway Labsound A00 card, with a Yamaha YMF719 (OPL3-SA3) chip! Now THAT's neat.

Last week, I started some ISA sound card testing. Being the retro masochist I am, I picked up an IBM MWave-based sound card at our local swap meet a few weeks back. During our last testing session, I couldn't get this to work. Will we succeed today? Let's find out! 🧵 time!
So, first, let's say this much: the MWave concept was cool with its use of a DSP. I benefitted from this back in the day when I upgraded my Dad's Thinkpad 755CX modem from 14.4 to 28.8 with a software upgrade! It knocked out sound when the modem was in use, but, well... ok 😂

I picked up four hard drives from the free table at our Northern Virginia meetup today. I am sure they are ALL going to work perfectly (foreshadowing). Let's talk about it briefly in a 🧵 here! First, let's go with the Western Digital Caviar drive. I popped it in the Kehtron desktop PC I had. Funny enough, that system already has a Caviar 22500, so on bootup, we see "twins" 😂

I did a component swap on the Enlight siblings today. I also went down a rabbit hole that I would never have anticipated doing, but it turned out well. Let's compare these cases, look at the components swapped, and the diversion I took, in a 🧵 here!
First, let's compare the front panels. Pretty similar, except the USB headers on the new one.

I've gotten a few items in the mail over the past few days. Let's test them out, and also improve the aesthetics of the re-enlightened PC. Time for a 🧵

First, we have this Sony CDU701 32X IDE drive. I put it in the retr0brite bin in the wee hours of the morning, and when I checked it out when I woke up, it looked great! Since it tests out good, it is going in this PC for good!

I have a bunch of ISA 16-bit sound cards to test! Let's test them (or at least try to test them) and select one to put in the new Re-Enlightened PC. Let's go! 🧵

Before we get too far into this, I copied over DOS/Win3.1x drivers that we will need for the five different sound cards, and also made a backup of my DOS/Win3.1x partition, since we'll most certainly be screwing it up. I also copied over some games to test in DOS.

I have a few updates for the Re-Enlightened PC that I built yesterday! Let's talk about them in a 🧵 here First of all, I completed a retr0brite on the combo floppy disk drive. I think it looks a little better now! Still not a perfect match, but close enough!

I have some testing updates from yesterday, and it is all good news! Time for a quick 🧵

First, as you might have gathered from the intro post, the new PC I built in the Enlight case passed a round of MemTest86+. I think I am going to nickname this PC "Re-enlightenment" since I already have a similar PC 😂

Alright, I have a confession, I caved and bought one of those NEW OLD STOCK ENLIGHT ATX CASES for sale on eBay!! It arrived today. What do you say, shall we build a PC? Let's do this! Time for a 🧵 First, an unboxing since I have the original box!! This case is an Enlight 7250AKD. It is a little different than my other Enlight case, but is pretty similar. And it is GOREGEOUS!

I have a bunch of things to test out! We won't get through all of them, but let's test what we can. We'll use the Pacman PC for our test rig. Let's go! Time for a 🧵


First, we'll test some PSUs. Yes, I know, this is risky, I am ok with that. The Antec ATX PSU that I tested had a "whine" to it, so I pulled it. The Enlight ATX PSU tested fine. I let the system boot into Hannah Montana Linux and set for a few minutes! Pass.

I spent a few minutes today setting up this Dell Latitude D600 laptop. It's a neat and zippy little Windows XP PC. Let's talk about it in a 🧵 here!
Here are the specs! Pentium M 1.60 GHz, and 2GB of memory. Pretty nice specs. And the battery is charging up nicely too. Score!

Alright, let's check out the $10 photo booth PC that I picked up on Thursday. Allegedly this PC was used in a mall photo booth kiosk, and it definitely is weird... and, well, I did get it to power on a few times, but that was it 😅. Time for a 🧵 First, in addition to being a desktop ATX case, it does have an interesting black oval on the front! Probably for infrared, I didn't take it apart, I was lazy. If so, that's a cool feature. And this ATX case has an AT mobo in it, with an AT I/O shield!

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 bought some memory to upgrade the Pacman PC. SURELY this will go off without a hitch.. surely it will. Okay, let's talk about it, in a 🧵 here!
So, as you saw from the intro picture, we're now showing 1.5 GB of memory in this lovely system. The system booted up into Hannah Montana Linux 😂. That's fine.. we can ask it how much memory it sees. Looking good!

I had some "larger" hard drives laying around, and wanted to put one in the new Kehtron computer. But to do that, I had to work around the 528MB limit of this computer's BIOS. Let's use XTIDE to do that...surely this adventure will go off without a hitch... right? Time for a 🧵

So, first of all, what is this 528MB limit all about? Well, older BIOSes were limited to 1024 cylinders. Around the 486 era, as drives got bigger, BIOSes started to support Logical Block Addressing mode. However, this particular BIOS does not.

Got a few things in the mail today! No need to really test the CPU fans or batteries, but let's test the video card! Time for a 🧵


So, this video card is a Tseng Labs ET4000AX. Here it is next to my other ET4000AX card. Some differences for sure!

Okay, let's get some software installed on this "new" 486DX/50 PC of mine. As per usual, nothing was flawless here, so let's go over what went well and where I hit some snags! Time for a 🧵 To get the installers on the box, I decided to use MS LAN Manager and the network. I made a special LAN Manager boot disk with drivers for the Intel EtherExpress 16TP that you see in the bottom of the last picture here.

My friend Bill gave me a bunch of case lock keys! Back in the days of the AT standard for cases, keylocks were pretty common on PC clones, and IBM systems as well. Let's see how many locks we can open today. Time for a silly 🧵
First, the Gateway 2000 you saw in the intro post. First key I tried worked 😂

I already have too many PCs, but I had to have this cute little guy... and there is also a good nostalgic reason for having it! This 386 (now 486) PC needed a lot of work to get it running, let's talk about it in a 🧵 here!
First, in case you missed it, here's the nostalgic reason. Kehtron is a part of my childhood. And this PC was available locally. The weather was also PERFECT yesterday for making an hour drive to get it and rocking out to some 80s tunes on the way 😂

https://x.com/RetroTechChris/status/1951100235561726359

In my haste yesterday, there are TWO THINGS that I forgot to do and post about for this "eMachines" system. One is more important than the other! Let's talk about it in a brief 🧵 here! First of all, before we get too far, recall that this isn't actually an eMachines. The original motherboard failed, and a Pentium III Biostar motherboard was put in to replace it, in what I am calling a "reverse sleeper"

https://x.com/RetroTechChris/status/1949660599153041482