Building a HUGE Retro Windows 95 PC!

[@AndrewAHayes]

I had a massive tower like that with four hard drives and 2 CD ROM copiers in it in 1999, it was running Windows 98, with a Pentium II and 64Mb of memory and a 3D accelerator, I built it myself for gaming and work, its board and memory ended up in my MAME cabinet that I built, I ended up selling the MAME cabinet for more money than I spent on the original PC.

[@haventyounoticed2409]

i love the energy in your videos, it's really fun and i like your sense of humor! hope to see your channel grow soon, you deserve it :)

[@happychoice98]

Thank you!! that means a lot ^^

[@LukiRudaka]

@@happychoice98 I completely agree with the other commenter there from one small creator to another ^^ BTW, I'm certified in Device Config. + Management (COMPTIA Specialist); I wouldn't recommend using period-correct PSUs. Just don't, it's not worth it. Most of them nowadays that are used probably have either gone bad or are close to doing so, and when the crap ones go bad they often take things with them.

[@idahofur]

When I first got into computers. Magazines like Computer shopper had articles about larger cases for more upgrades. I told customer they did not need such a large full height tower. Some listened and some did not. More than one came in and explained they should have listened. Great server cases if you need to load them up with hard drives, tape backup and cd drives for data.

[@Thega74]

babe wake up happychoice posted

[@VictorNelvanaShows]

Hi. Your PC looks awesome. I'm an African-American dude who likes retro PC's.

[@matt.willoughby]

Geeks are all colours 😊

[@JoBot__]

Not quite sure how race is relevant, but cool. 👍

[@nerdycatgamer]

thanks for sharing VictorNelvanaShows

[@223_Wylde]

I had this exact case/listing in my watchlist for a bit, glad I got see what awaited it and to have gotten to live vicariously through your build video!

[@littlegoobie]

$180 for an old bare case. I'm sitting on a gold mine. I also have some Xeon servers that are bigger dinosaurs than this case. They weigh 70-80lbs. stacked with ram, hotswap drives, redundant hot swap psu's, hot swap fans that are so loud.

[@ScarletPanda280]

I just found your video while in bed recovering from a dumb cold, very entertaining and will sub for sure! Keep it up!

[@averyvaliant]

So much nostalgia in this video it's insane Trinitron tube monitor? Deskstar hard drive? ATI Rage card?.....oh my. haha Loving the videos.

[@slacko1971]

This took me back, first PC I ever built had the Athlon 800 mhz in it. Thanks for the memories.

[@matt.willoughby]

That was fast enough to play GTA San Andreas though

[@a_googIeuser]

Damn, this guy is too underrated. You, sir, just got a sub.

[@happychoice98]

thank you!!

[@modernrice]

great video! one suggestion for the future is to turn off autofocus when setting up stationary camera angles. this way, you don't run the risk of focus breathing in the middle of a long cut, or the autofocus selecting the wrong thing to focus on.

[@ALCvideoprofile]

This is great! Every time I think of Windows 95 - 98 I remember how much I miss screensavers.

[@anotherrandomguy2763]

My guy you just earned a sub! I like the vibe you give off and you do one of my favorite things, building pcs! Keep it up!

[@garfleid2773]

best video so far, this tower looks AWESOME

[@thegoathead7538]

Looks great! Recently picked up an old Lenovo T400 for like $20, and planning to dual boot it! Still need a new hard drive and battery, tho.

[@giacgiac21]

zOMG so cool !!!!!1!1!1!1!1!1 i hop you get more subz, your underated

[@actualhoppip]

WE LOVE HAPPY CHOICE

[@ParadoxDergASMR]

I absolutely love the energy of this video! Super entertaining to watch in the background while I wrestle a Lua script xD I cannot wait to see your channel grow further! Your content so far has been super entertaining and I'm here for it :D I too some day hope to upload videos on retro computers. I have 2 original Intel 8088 processors lying around that I hope to maybe design my own computer with. I LOVE watching content on old computers like this and I really hope to some day have the money to start buying and restoring old machines and making videos about them like youtubers who have inspired me like The 8-Bit Guy, Bits und Bolts, LGR, Adrian's Digital Basement and more 💜

[@Fallokoch]

I had a similar setup around 97-99! My dad gave me a bunch of spare PC parts and told me if I could get a computer running, I could play doom!

[@dogedudefx]

You deserve a sub, very enjoyable content. Honestly I expected you to have more subs :P Hope everything goes well man! :D

[@epiclolz695]

I like when youtube recommends me cool small channels

[@HalianTheProtogen]

4:30 That “BORN TO CORRUPT” meme fucking murdered me 🤣

[@egmccann]

See, that's something I really enjoyed with PCs of this era - turning them on felt like you were going through a process... that there was "stuff going on." The monitor having that "whmmm....." as it warmed up, the PC giving all those nice, chonky, "I... LIIIIIVE!" sounds with the floppy and hard drive spinning up... *sighs* (Also... 98 > 95. I used to have a triple boot machine back in the day - on a 350 Mb HD. DOS, OS/2 and Win95. (At one point it also alternately had early Slackware or BeOS. I was pushing that 486.) I swapped out the 9600 baud modem for either a 14.4 or a 28.8. Fixed jumpers. DOS, OS/2? Update the speed in the comm software. Good to go. 95? I had to spend an hour convincing it that no, that was a modem, not a new serial mouse on Com10 and playing whack-a-mole with that... it really was "plug and pray" with 95. MUCH better in 98.)

[@joskalakatos1178]

This is a real retro build...Lots of nostalgy, recognizable sound when the hard drive spins and starts booting Windows 95 or 98 system. And inside Voodoo graphics card with games like Quake, Diabo, Starcraft...

[@7eis]

Bigass cases with eatx support and larger where always really cool in my eyes. My dad ran a video production business out of a spare room in the 90ies and early 00s. He would retire his rack computers into used cases like these for us kids to enjoy. All the goodies like soundcards, USB, serial ports galore for controllers and such, network cards would fill it while the front allowed multiple optical drives, lots of legacy stuff, i/o ports and duplicates of every size floppy. Extra hdds would be jammed in for game storage. Turbo button actually did something for a while. Matrox graphics cards and good CRTs with high refresh rated got me spoiled and hating the early LCDs. Oh how times have changed

[@thornstrikesback]

Seeing that internal PC speaker brings back lots of memories. I remember playing Wolfenstein 3D on my 386SX33 with the PC speaker.... Good times.

[@clezou]

love your chanel dude, just keep going please! i came from X

[@789e2d]

I was 8 minutes in before noticing that this is a brand new channel. And only because I had to double check after you repeatedly stated it. Editing and presentation are well executed. Quality video.

[@happychoice98]

@@789e2d much appreciated!! :D

[@SamwiseOutdoors]

It shipped from Michigan, so it's either made out of stolen catalytic converters or previously belonged to Joe Kassabian.

[@GTXDash]

1:06 E E. EEEEEEEEE If you guys haven't seen this meme, look for it. I got a good laugh out of it.

[@MICHA3L216]

HappyChoice is back!

[@happychoice98]

:D

[@shaheryarmuhammadali5843]

Love the periodic table on the wall.

[@PennPal573]

Really enjoyed watching this, you've got a nice and comfy presentation style! Feels like listening to a friend talking about their interests

[@GMHS_Nerd]

Man ive been wanting a tower like that for a bit thats a sweet build man i enjoyed your video!

[@highfidelitynerd0278]

I love the sound effects you put in there at 10:29. It fits the situation very well. :D

[@AlphaMensae1]

MikeTech mention gets a sub from me! I still have my PCs from the 90s and 2000s: 486DX4/120, Pentium 233 MMX, Athlon 900 (Thunderbird) and a Core2Duo system from Feb 2007; all are still working fine. And parlty thanks to channels like this one, I'm discovering how retro PCs are a a big thing, ans so have collected parts for systems that I never got.

[@tj_2701]

Entertaining video, I had fun watching it and will have to see what other videos you have. 👍👍👍👍

[@itakofkarstaag]

Brother you are an entertaining presenter and a creative editor. Keep on keepin' on.

[@littlegoobie]

8:12 anyone who was there remembers this. the end of the s7 period, the spring latches on the cpu coolers were so strong that MANY boards were killed when people speared the motherboard with a screwdriver, pliers or whatever. It was such a big problem that they actually made a tool to unlatch/latch the cooler with the least risk. Amd cpu's ran so hot that all decent aftermarket coolers whirled and whined like small jet engines. It was ridiculous. plus amd overlocking was THE thing to do.

[@MotownBatman]

Damn Straight Michigan Mentioned New Sub; Detroit, Michigan

[@bandiras2]

I have a similar case in the corner of my room. It was my daily driver for a decade. It also served as my handrest and mousepad holder.

[@Mr.MaChInIsTdUdE]

Nice! I am currently working on a similar project. Looking forward to seeing more.

[@emperorarasaka]

This bad boy can hold your entire PC and your clothes for a week.

[@hochhaul]

8:17 lmao this was the part I was looking forward to. I have vivid memories of trying to hook that spring after replacing my CPU cooler with an OC upgrade bit and sweating bullets while trying to use a huge screwdriver to push down on it. Koss was everywhere when it came to pc speakers back then!

[@procta2343]

I love large towers, when i was studying computers 20 years ago, i built a large tower for server role, so i could use the drive bays for extra storage at the time. years later i rebuilt my large tower PC, with a nice large case, Lian 90 or something in sliver. it weighs about a ton, and that was before i stacked it full of HDDs. You could go one better with this one, and get a large IDE cable and move the CD rom drive to the top of the case. Also i think support for windows 95 was still around for this era too, due to the fact it was still used in offices and schools right up till the early 2003. Also i think the pentium 3 is the best for the old school stuff i found, as you still can get ISA onboard still. But the P4 i think that was dropped and SATA was popping up.

[@simonfrederiksen104]

0:33 Jeez - your thing is huge!

[@Montgomerygolfgator]

Hard disks from the 90s are in a bit of a sour spot. They're made from more specialized parts than ones from the 80s, which bearings and stepper motors for an RLL drive are probably still made for completely different purposes. They're also reaching the age where they can up and die for pretty much any reason. I mean, the span of time between now and 1995 is the same as 1995 and 1966. Long-ass, plenty of time for parts to seize and chemical reactions to happen. What you could do, is get a sata caddy in one of the drive bays and put an IDE to SATA adapter onto the caddy receiver. You lose the clicks, but even the cheapest worst quality SATA SSDs will more than saturate the IDE bus. Careful partitioning and Grub4dos, and you could put a dozen OSes on one disk, while also being able to pop it into your modern computer if needed. Or you could just get a sd2ide i guess haha.

[@guerreiropro21]

I subscribed

[@DeltaTenNZ]

Epic Ed is epic. Also agreed on Windows 95 being a great OS. Lots of great memories from my post-MS DOS and Windows 3.1 days. Either way enjoyed your video, presentation style, and the humour sprinkled throughout. Also as a sorta unrelated aside, Windows 98 was kinda cool too 👍(Don't know how I felt about Windows ME that came after it/Before Windows XP however.)

[@chip1gray]

Quick question, what do you keep in the top half? I subbed you bud, love watching people enjoy the hobby. I have been into retro computers for 15 years now. use to think I was the only one in the world interested in this stuff. I was buying voodoo cards for £5-10 UK whenever I wanted one for a build, never thought of stockpiling the things seeing as they were so cheap haha. Anyway LGR came and made the hobby what it is today then retro machines built communities on FB and YT and now I love to watch people building coom machines like yours.

[@linuxmint9223]

This one is really cool. I myself usually play some old games such as Halo, Jazz Rabbit on windows 98, im from Sweden

[@wakcedout]

Damn sata cables have made wiring things up so much easier. Watching this reminds me of how clunky ide cables were. I say as I wouldn’t mind building a 2006ish era high end xp pc to play my old games.

[@Ghost_PM11]

Power supplies were supposed to be replaced monthly in the 90s if I remember correctly

[@HalianTheProtogen]

13:49 No, Focus FK-2001. :D

[@Flea-Flicker]

If the company is still in business, send the warranty card in. The novelty alone will get their attention, maybe get some free stuff.

[@JessicaFEREM]

if there's something to gleam about koss, it's either excellent sound for a good price, or absolute e-waste. there's no in between, and even some of their good stuff is e-waste simply because they use cheap components and don't build them to last.

[@technoir2584]

I always wanted to find a massive 90's tower and build a modern gaming pc. Like a sleeper PC.

[@firenado4295]

man, I just got a case almost exactly like this. However its like mine is a cheaper knock off version of this. the metal is not rounded off as nice, there is only one central 80mm fan home in the top and no other real ventilation and the side panels have no design on them at all. it has the EXACT same front bezel, but the interesting thing is there is no punch out for a second floppy drive in the case even though there is in the bezel and in the drive cage so it can only be used for an hdd. The other interesting thing is the riveted in 5.25 to 3.5 inch adapter that was from the factory in the top drive slot.

[@firenado4295]

was gonna say I was sad that you got a version of the case I had but but better ventilation since I just have my gaming pc in mine. However 180 bucks???? holy crap, and I thought I over payed for mine that I got for 30.

[@GenerationPixel]

That, my friend, is a sexy rig 👏

[@redleader6442]

C-E on the side of the case. A C and a dash. Easy mistake to make. Also, fun fact: The WD Expert you picked was actually made by IBM and rebadged when they worked with WD in a short lived joint venture.

[@lttbriantheelectrician]

Well, firstly is that IBM system you use for OS/2 Warp 4 a PC350 by chance? I have a PC350 and it looks identical and is also a Pentium 166. I've also got a PC365 that is one of my favorite systems, its a dual socket 8 (Pentium Pro), though it currently just has a single 200mhz 256k P-Pro in it. An Athlon 800 is definitely overkill for Windows 95 but that said it's certainly a light weight OS for one. The downside however is 95 is limited to I think DirectX 7 or 8 whereas 98/98SE/ME etc can go up to DirectX 9c. Whether or not this is an issue for you though depends entirely on the software you plan on running on it. Personally I usually run 95 on fast 486's, Pentium 1's and Pentium II's or slower super socket 7 systems. That case is awesome though! That style came in quite a few forms... I have a few myself that are styled the same but have only 2 or 3 5-1/4" drive bays but they oddly enough don't have the "EE" on the side. Windows 95 is what our first computer ran, and what I grew up on until pretty much highschool. The nostalgia is strong lol the startup sound always gets me. I prefer it in most cases over 98 or 98SE; I tend to either run 95, or on faster machines go straight to 2000. I also just started messing with NT4, and that is an adventure all on it's own. Great video! I look forward to catching your next build!

[@bookshelffury]

I like the half life collision sounds lol

[@danthompsett2894]

CPU cooler looks puny, yeah Socket A mounting is scarey lots of pressure with a flatbade screwdriver that if you slip with all that pressure you risk smashing a tiny component on the board.

[@arutezza]

ive got a huge old thermaltake htpc case sitting in storage i need to do something with, i love these stupidly big cases, has such a prescense

[@danthompsett2894]

Bending PIins back on a CPU is a hella lot easier than trying to bend back LGA socket pins that a microscopic and lay in a particular spring loaded way, the mounting pressure on the pins of older hardware is alot better than newer stuff, i bet the cpu doesnt get stuck to the heatsink with that socket. judging thermal paste on those cpu's is a piece of cake, as its just a small die, so literally a small grain of compound is enough.

[@JayBitTheGamer]

18:08 I think the EE means.. Electrical engineering A branch of engineering that studies the use of electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism in the design, application, and study of equipment, devices, and systems.

[@lucaspIs]

thank you liquid LGR

[@crash.override]

I'd love to connect an IDESATA adapter + modern SSD, and see to what extent the HDD was holding back the system's speed.

[@Star_squirrel]

You did not test it before you put on the side panel

[@Kennyyule-c8h]

Love This Vid.

[@Undertale_12-1]

I love this

[@burtongibson9695]

Totally forgot about those horrible ribbon cables and sometimes you'd mount the hard drive upside down (or was that just me) and then you'd have to either remount it it figure out how to turn the cable plug upside down if it was a second drive. As soon as the power button didnt work, my first thought was "check the switch on the psu" 😂😂

[@danthompsett2894]

YEP The Vintage American Ebay Market comes at Heavy Premuim, try persuading someone from the UK to spend £100 on an old Tower Case like that one and they will laugh in your face and offer you a £20 note.

[@mr.unknown_74]

Nice video! Hope to see more!

[@eftalanquest]

this looks like the noname white label case that's standing under a desk behind me right now but not quite

[@null13336]

this is the most butifl thing ive ever sawed

[@anonymousidea9119]

now use it as new wave furniture

[@Sask3187]

Ah yes old Athlon CPU's, have one of them and you dont need any Space heater to keep your home warm during winter times.

[@JessicaFEREM]

eeepc more like EE pc

[@Vlad-1986]

Man, you where a bit lucky. A faster processor and you would had needed a kernel patch to boot. I think you could go up to 256mb or 512 mb of RAM without patching (I am not sure, by the time computers shipped with 512 Mb of RAM, win 98se was closing EOL. That was the early 2000s)

[@TrizziEhgan]

i'd definitely beat myself for this setup

[@issynonomicaword]

i- that’s a *skyscraper,* dude

[@nicktech540]

Dude that thing is huuge!

[@samwalker7567]

Did I miss something? POSTed with 256MB of RAM but Windows only showing 128?

[@happychoice98]

@@samwalker7567 i noticed that as well, my guess is i bumped into a stick when messing with the IDE jumpers and knocked it out of its seat. I reseated both sticks after filming and got the full memory back!

[@waize]

Fan noise is faulty sleeve bearings, mainly on psu fan since you lubricated the cpu fan.

[@neooccisor8272]

Funny computer the long way

[@lillybee2083]

i miss when i had time to tinker with old hardware xD but hey atleast i can watch someone else do it for 20 minutes.

[@MimiWhiskers]

Hopefully, that zip drive isn’t suffering the click of death. The 100s are notorious for that issue.

[@PicklesJasken]

If that case is built similar to one I own then im 99% sure the motherboard tray can come out as one part, as it looks from the back you can undo 2 screws, and I think 1 or 2 inside the case and it pulls out.

[@PicklesJasken]

Also the case itself looks to be based off of cases build by UK manufacturer DAN, If you look up Dan technology computers one single image shows up with a mid tower case that looks similar, I was looking through old UK pc magazines and found a photo of a Full tower that looked almost similar to this case. there not the exact same but pretty damn close.

[@wrlrdqueek]

Ok, you have 1 more sub.

[@kleinergaming2008]

now edit and upload a video from it

[@kleinergaming2008]

update: he made it into a piece of furniture for his living room... 😔

[@deanster3435]

Bro got the Gondola Tower frfr

[@cabbitkisser2620]

i never owned a computer that had windows 95 on it. my first computer had windows 3.1.1. later i bought a compaq pc back in 98 or 99. it had windows 98 installed on it

[@aspen3718]

i like this this is good edit: wait, what goes in the whole top section?

[@dimension4700]

im planning on building a modern gaming pc with a case just like that lol

[@bendy3096]

"decorative paper towels" yeah, sure.

[@mexicanmalware]

I'm starting to make car content but I don't want to stick to just cars even though it'll tank potential growth I have a short where I'm debating showing my thermal application too haha. Fuck it not many people are gonna get mad

[@actualpiskov]

John Windows95 posting!!

[@richwater296]

those amd things got really hot and smoke came out when they overheated, sometimes kills the thing too

[@theopenrift]

So what made you want to run Win95 on this instead of Win98? Those specs seem more befitting of the latter if you ask me.