Refurbishing an eMachine For Future eWaste Projects

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-31

[00:00:01]Howdy y'all. I have an E machine here. I can't remember when I got this particular one. It was some time ago, but I love picking up the E machines.

[00:00:07]And uh my channel icon is no indication of that, but I feel like we could try to find some fun little purposes for these tiny little boxes. Plus, uh I I love that power button. That power button is so good. Oo, this one came with a DVD drive. So, I have no idea if this thing even works, if there's anything in it, what's on it, or what not. So, I figured why don't we take a look at it today.

[00:00:24]So, let's see here. Definitely an older machine. Okay, so we got some of the RAM in there. There we got the CPU. Is there a hard drive in here? Oh, right there.

[00:00:32]There's a hard drive. So, this thing should be self sustaining. Now, I'm not going to clean it out quite yet. I just want to see if it powers on first. But yeah, I'm going to put the cover on. We can see if we can get the E machine running and if there's any goodies for us on the hard drive. Well, only VGA out. So, we'll be using the NEC monitor today. Well, I believe I have everything that I need in order to get this hooked up. So, let's power it on. See if there's anything on it. There's that beep. Okay, what do we got here? So, it looks like it's got some DDR3 RAM in there. About 4 gigs. All right. Using one of these kinds of DVD drives.

[00:00:57]Doesn't say necessarily what the size of the hard drive is. CMOS check some error. I mean, that's going to make sense. Battery and that's not going to be good. But let's continue. Wait, is this running Windows 10? I was kind of expecting this thing to be running Windows 7, but someone put 10 on this.

[00:01:09]Things taking forever to boot, but I mean, I'm not surprised. This machine is probably around 20 years old, and it's running an operating system that's 10 years newer than this. And now that I think about this, this operating system is over 10 years old. Jeez, time's flying. Automatic repair couldn't fix your PC. I mean, yeah, that's fine.

[00:01:22]Yeah, sure. Continue. Let's see what happens. I mean, it might just be that uh because of the camos, it freaked out.

[00:01:26]Oh no, we're in. And apparently this belonged to James. I think no password.

[00:01:30]So it's just going to let us in. I see this and I'm like, "Oh, James channel reference." Oh, cool. We do have a mouse. I'm like, "It's taking a minute to get in there." Oh, there we go. Okay.

[00:01:37]Apparently, it thinks it is November 7th, 2020. Looks like a Skype installer.

[00:01:41]Rest in peace. And I mean, it looks like this PC probably wasn't used. Normally, you would see a lot more stuff on the desktop cuz no one cleans their desktop.

[00:01:48]And this all looks very, very stock.

[00:01:50]Ooh, we got e machine documentation.

[00:01:52]This version of Windows 10 has Cortana on it still. Oh jeez. Wow. This machine is slow. Windows 10 should not have been put on this. Oh no. What's it doing now?

[00:01:59]Got a UIC prompt for something. Recovery management. I No. No. We don't We don't need to recover. We're good. Okay. Now it's giving me control. Oh, okay. This is back when the search was still garbage. All right. Run MS info32. Okay.

[00:02:09]It's running build 17134. It's got a Celeron in there. 2.2 GHz one core. Got 4 gigs of RAM. See how's the drive looking? Okay. It's got nearly a 500 GB hard drive. Most of it's free. So, I think this is pretty much a fresh version. Oh. Oh, look at this masterpiece. Oh, look at that. This looks like I drew it on the my first Sony. Yeah, a kid definitely drew this untitled.png. What a beautiful piece of art. Beyond that, the rest of this is empty. No videos, no music. Only stuff we have in the downloaders is just uh some very basic stuff like setting up Chrome. Date modified 2016 2012. Okay.

[00:02:42]Oh jeez, that's over 10 years ago. Not much on the desktop either. Wonder what's in book. Oh, it's documentation about the E machines. I should save this. So, this is making me think that this like person might have used like a recovery image for like e- machine specifically and then upgraded it to Windows 10. Copyright 2010. Jeez, we're still kicking around then. Well, it's got a DVD drive in it. Let's try playing Doom.

[00:03:03]Cool. It just loads. Dplay. DLL was not found. Oh, okay. Oh, maybe I need to like run this in compatibility mode.

[00:03:08]That'll probably help. Windows 95.

[00:03:10]Dplay. DLL was not found. I think I've had a fix that works for this. H, there you go. DplayX. DLL. Let's copy that.

[00:03:16]And let's just rename that to Dplay.

[00:03:19]Okay, let's give it a try now. Well, we got a little bit farther. Oh, it's cuz it wants DOSs. All right, I'm just going to get a source port. But which version of Windows is this running? Uh 64-bit.

[00:03:26]Okay. Whoops. Okay, I got to add uh I got to add the wad. Oh, I forgot about Unholy Massacre. But let's do ultraviolent E1 M1. Here we go. Ooh, that's chugging. That's not running too good.

[00:03:37]Why is it running so bad? What if I run it outside of full screen? No, still pretty bad. Let me try one of the other uh renderers. Just normal OpenGL. Nope, did not like that. 100% CPU. What is maxing out our CPU? Anti-malware. We don't need that. Access is denied. What?

[00:03:51]Well, guess what? I'm giving myself access. Goodbye.

[00:03:55]What do you mean? I'm the admin. Stop hoging up my CPU. This machine should not have Windows 10 on it. Okay, Windows is upsetting me. We're going to do something else. If Windows won't let me do what I want to do, my Linux dro of choice. Let's see here if I'm able to actually launch this now. I got an app image here of Uzi Doom. Oh, we got something going. Wait, where did Holy Masker go? Whatever. A there we go.

[00:04:14]That's running so much better. Oh, and the UI is very tiny. So, I should probably fix that real quick. There we go. Okay, now we're actually playing at a decent FPS. This is now completely playable. Let's go ahead and do a speedrun real quick. See how fast we can get through it.

[00:04:47]There we go. Got it. Okay. 21 seconds.

[00:04:49]All right. Now, I'm going to have to add like a leaderboard of what my time getting through E1 M1 Ultraviolence is on all these different machines. But if I can get like XP installed on this, I'm probably just going to turn this into like, I don't know, a disc testing machine cuz I have a whole bunch of like fun random software I want to try out and such. And I'm going to need a machines from each era in order to be able to properly do it. I want to make sure they have the best bet whenever I do these polls. So, I just need another machine over here that can just throw a bunch of operating systems on and just kind of do whatever I want with it and showcase it here on camera. I don't really want to use a PC that I'm recording with to do any software stuff.

[00:05:19]And I'm kind of getting tired of, you know, pulling out a monitor and showing that. Plus, I've been getting complaints about the low resolution of it. So, what we're going to do is we're going to take this machine and pull out the SATA cable and stuff and basically just make it so we can just like have this here on the side and plug in hard drives. But, I'm not going to use hard drives. Instead, I have this. This 3D printed enclosure is holding a SATA to SD adapter. And what this will essentially let me do is just plug this guy into here like that. And I can just take SD cards from my operating systems on it and use this as like the primary hard drive. So I can quickly swap out if I want like, you know, Windows XP or Linux or if I'm going way back with Windows 95 or 98. And that allows us to have multiple different versions of operating systems. And also if I just, you know, mess up one operating system too much. These are only like 16 GB. So I could just make a restore state and flash it. But there'll be a few things we'll need to do. Mostly get this thing cleaned cuz uh little it's a little dusty. I got a lot of plans and it all kind of depends on having a machine I can just show some more stuff off with. I know some people are just like, "Why don't you use virtual machines?" I like having bare metal cuz like, you know, one purpose of this machine that I want is to be able to have something I can plug in controllers in and test them on. So, I'll probably just have some sort of Linux operating system of a whole bunch of controller testers and stuff. And that way I don't have to like, you know, plug in a controller and try to pass the USB over like the virtual machine stuff.

[00:06:24]Makes it a lot easier. For some reason, a lot of these screws aren't very tight.

[00:06:27]While I'm in here, I might as well repaste this. Okay, I need to wash my hands after this. Motherboard is out.

[00:06:32]And while I'm in here, I might as well remove the power supply. Okay, now I want to go get gloves. There we go.

[00:06:39]That's really dusty. Okay, this entire module just comes out then. And now that is removed as well. And you might be wondering, hey, if this thing has like an SD card reader in it, why am I using this like adapter if I'm putting my operating systems on an SD card? And that's cuz this motherboard doesn't have an option to boot from SD. So, I'm just making it think it's booting from a hard drive. Well, all the cables with the exception of the power button and activity lights have been removed. Go ahead and get the heat sink of this off.

[00:07:02]Okay, heat sinks removed. And there's our processor. Oh, I guess the thermal paste isn't entirely crusted over, but we will be replenishing that. Go ahead and take out the sticks of RAM here, too. This is worth a fortune, even though it's only 2 GB of DDR3. Well, two 2 GB sticks. Yep. All the caps are still looking fine. Luckily, the capacitor plague hasn't like uh affected these ones. I'm going to go take this outside and get it cleaned a little bit. So, I'll be right back. Well, I got this stuff cleaned up as much as I'm probably going to be able to get it. So, time to start cleaning up this and repasting.

[00:07:29]First, I'll just try to get up as much as I can without the isopropyl. Coming up pretty nicely, actually, even without it. Actually, now I'm thinking about we probably didn't need the isopropyl at all. Anyway, here is the CPU. Intel 86458 Celeron. That should be plenty.

[00:07:46]And a new 2032 battery. We'll need the power supply back in there. Now, all that's left is to take the wires here and get those fed back in. And return the DVD drive stuff in as well. Cover can go on. Oh, actually I can't have those cables like that. Looks like I'll need to reroute this. Now we can put this on.

[00:08:04]And now we're just going to attach this guy like right here. So I'm thinking I just get some Velcro. Goes on just like that. And it should be good to go. And now I can take my SD cards and just put my operating systems in like that.

[00:08:13]Perfect. Well, I'm going to go try to get things set up and then see what we can do about this screen. Well, I think I got everything hooked up the way I want. So now all I just need to do is press this button. And now I'm actually directly video capturing and sending to OBS what I'm seeing on this Windows PC over here. And this is running Windows XP. And so, yeah, as you can kind of see underneath the monitor that this mouse is controlling it there. So, I need to figure out like a better kind of way in order to like, you know, still show my hands and stuff cuz if I do this, it's it's going to be under the screen. But now I have a decent way of actually showing off uh my different machines.

[00:08:41]I'll need to get the audio drivers working for this. And I'll probably need to figure out a better like overlay. But I'll do the audio stuff off camera. It's not necessarily that uh fun. But that's going to be it for now. So long, y'all.