My First PC - Slimline Gateway 2000 486

My first PC was a Gateway 2000 Slimline 486 which I think I got in 1994.  I've been wanting to re-acquire one of these machines for quite a few years since I got back into Retro Computing, but they've become a bit rare and I've been unwilling to spend eBay prices for one.  At the end of last year I got lucky and one came up for sale at Free Geek Twin Cities as a "Project Machine".   Free Geek is transparent about the problems with these machines and they sell them at really low prices.  The notes on the machine said "Floppy Controller Might be Bad", but the price was low enough that I could afford to fail.

When I got the machine home, I did power up the machine and confirmed the symptom, but I also noticed that the entire machine was filthy.  It wasn't just normal dust either, it was a thick sticky layer so I took the machine all the way apart and cleaned the circuit board with alcohol, opened the power supply and blew it out, and the case with water.

When I got the machine back together I was able to find notes about the motherboard on TheRetroWeb.  I was even able to contribute a BIOS dump and an image to the site!  Neither the floppy drive nor the CD-ROM drive worked on this machine.  I took them apart and cleaned the heads, but I wasn't able to bring these drives back to function.  I had the exact correct floppy drive and CD-ROM replacement from another Gateway 2000 machine that I'd tried and failed to repair earlier.

The other upgrades I installed include 16MB RAM and a Compact Flash adapter that is attached to a slot cover at the back of the machine.  This is attached to the IDE on the Motherboard and configured in the BIOS as a 485 MB HDD, but of course it is faster than a spinning drive.  But the main advantage of the CF solution is that it makes it easy to move files back and forth to the PC from a modern computer.  I also had a Sound Blaster 16 Value card from another lot of retro computer parts and I installed that into this machine as well as a 3COM Ethernet NIC card.

This machine is a 486DX2-66, and my machine was only 25MHz with 4MB RAM, so this feels really fast compared to what I had back in the day.  This machine currently has Windows 95 on it, but I may go back and setup another CF card with DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 which would have been what I ran on this computer back in the day.

I'm quite happy with how this build turned out and enjoying the nostalgia of having a Gateway 2000 machine configured with the options I really wanted back in the day.