Reviving a Taped-Together Dell Dimension 2400

Overview

I picked up this Dell Dimension 2400 as part of a batch of 10 computers for $80. This budget Socket 478 machine from 2003 came with a Celeron 2.4GHz CPU and was literally held together with tape. What started as a simple repair turned into a full restoration project with multiple component failures, a mystery BIOS, incompatible RAM, and ultimately a spray-paint makeover. In the end, I got Windows 98 running on this Frankenstein PC.

Key Moments

• Inspecting the taped-together case and finding no hard drive caddy
• Testing the power supply and verifying voltages are within spec
• Discovering the motherboard identifies as an Optiplex 160L instead of Dimension 2400
• Troubleshooting memory incompatibility between two different RAM modules
• Giving the yellowed case a black spray paint restoration
• Dealing with a flaky CD-ROM drive during Windows 98 installation
• Power supply failure and replacement with a 400W CoolMax unit
• Successfully booting Windows 98 with Flight Simulator installed

Full Transcript (Edited)

Hey, so I recently bought a batch of computers for $80. I think I bought about 10 of them, and this is one of the computers that came in that batch. I got two more of these in that batch, so we’re going to go through them in separate videos. I’m going to start off with this one.

This is a Dimension 2400, and these are budget computers that came out in 2003. This one is a little bit underpowered. Usually they came with Celerons and Pentium 4s, and these are Socket 478 motherboards. This is a Celeron, as it says there. They came with either one or two optical drives. As you can see, this one right here is a little bit beat up and it’s held together by tape.

I did plug in the power cable to this, but all I got was some activity and nothing on the screen. So what I’m going to do is open it up, take out the motherboard, test the power supply, and see if we can get this up and running. I think what I’m going to do with this one is install Windows 98 on it. Let me go ahead and take it apart.

Inside the Dell Dimension 2400

As you can see here, this motherboard has three PCI slots and they didn’t put an AGP slot. This does have built-in video, and the CPU is underneath that right there. I do have what looks like two memory slots, and this originally came with 512MB. Let’s see what’s in here right now.

So this is 256MB, so it’s probably going to be two sticks of 256. Yep, 256 and 256, so 512 megs. And it’s got no hard drive installed and an optical drive. Looks like it’s missing the hard drive caddy right here, so we’re going to have to use an adapter from 5.25” to 3.5” to get something mounted in here. Whoever took this apart discarded the hard drive bracket.

So what I’m going to do right now is take it apart, get my power supply tester to see if the voltages are coming out correctly, and we’ll go from there.

Power Supply Testing

Okay, so I just plugged in my power supply tester. I plugged in the power cable, and as you can see here the voltages are within range. The 12V line is at 11.8V on the negative, positive is at 11.7V. The 5 volts is at 5.1 or 5.0, so it’s doing okay.

Dell’s Proprietary Connectors

Before I tear this down, I wanted to show you how this is all wired together in case you’ve never worked on one of these before. In the front here we have this bracket that holds the power button and two LEDs, the activity LEDs. If I go down here, this is connected using this connector on the board. On most motherboards that you buy from the store, you would get a header on the board, but since this is a Dell product they give you a custom or proprietary header that plugs in and it’s easy to service.

The fan shroud uses these big fans. This lifts right off from the back. It has a clip that slides in the back and has this clip on the side here that you would press and then clip up, and it connects here. As you can see, there’s a shroud that pulls the heat through the fan out of the case. This was really good back then because it provides a very quiet airflow for this computer.

CPU Removal

Now let me show you how the CPU heatsink is connected here. On both sides there are these green little clips. Let me see if I can take this off without breaking it because sometimes they become brittle. That came off like that. So you can see here they sometimes break off right there, and they hold down the heatsink.

The heatsink also has these clips right here. By undoing that, I can lift up the heatsink. Maybe the thermal paste is dried up and it won’t be a problem. But sometimes when I used to work on these, if you lift up the heatsink right now, it might pull out the entire CPU. Got to be careful with these plastics because they’re 20 years old, so they might break.

Okay, so I’m just going to lift it up. And it did not pull the chip out of the socket. Sometimes if thermal paste is really wet, like if you ran the machine and it was hot and it wasn’t dried up like this, it would yank out the CPU with the heatsink on it and you could damage the socket or accidentally bend pins. In this case this is super dry, so this probably has never been opened in the last 20 years.

The CPU Specs

So if you’re working on this, the way to take the CPU out is to push over this little lever, lift it up, and now the CPU lifts right up. Got to be careful because these chips do have the pins on them. This is a Socket 478, and it’s a Celeron 2.4 GHz with 128 kilobytes of L2 cache and a 400 megahertz front side bus.

If you don’t know what that means, obviously it’s a 2.4 GHz chip. This one is an original Celeron, so it’s a single core. It has 128 kilobytes of level two cache compared to, you know, now CPUs have megabytes. And 400 megahertz frontside bus, that’s pretty slow. That is on the low end, considering that now you have gigahertz, multiples of gigahertz on the bus between the CPU and the memory.

These PCI slots run at 33 MHz. The AGP, if it had any, would probably run around 66 MHz, depending on the multiplier. But between the CPU and the memory was 400 MHz with this one.

You also have on this motherboard the P4 connector. This gives the power for the CPU area here. You see all those capacitors and everything, so that’s how it gets 12 volts dedicated just for the CPU. This is called the P4 because it came out with the Pentium 4 CPU. I don’t see any major issues with the capacitors, so they don’t look like they’re bulging or anything like that.

First Boot Attempt

So what I’m going to do is take the board out. I’ll take out this plastic bracket and see if I can power it outside the machine and get it to show something on the display.

Okay, so here is the motherboard and I went ahead and plugged it in. I reseated the memory and I was actually able to get it up and running. So if I press the power button right here and I take a look at the output here, it should display. Huh, it didn’t work this time.

Okay, so I have the motherboard outside now and I just have the heatsink kind of sitting on top of the CPU here so that it dissipates some kind of heat. I went ahead and reseated the memory and I was able to get some output out of this. But right now when I turn it back on, I do see the LED turn on here.

The Mystery POST Codes

And this computer actually has this really cool feature which is it has its own onboard POST indicator. So as you can see here these are some POST codes and they turned off. That is probably an error code for memory. Let me disconnect some memory here and give this a try.

All right, as you can see here, now it’s posting. And if I go up here to the monitor, now it shows the actual POST screen.

RAM Compatibility Issues

Let me explain what I have here. I have the heatsink just sitting on top of the CPU. I removed the memory and I put it aside over here. I powered up the power supply. I’ve already been testing this and I was actually able to get some output. My troubleshooting has led me to believe that there’s an incompatibility between these two memory modules.

When I saw this module right here, this looks like some kind of generic weird brand that I’ve never seen before. And I also noticed that it looks very different from this one in terms of chips. That doesn’t always mean anything because the arrangement of the memory module internally might be the same. But from my experience, this kind of gave me a red flag.

So I plugged in just this module, which is a Micron module. It’s very likely that the Dell came originally with this module installed and this one was added later on. Or just whoever put this together just picked this out of a box or something. What I noticed is if I plug in this one by itself, the computer boots up. If I plug in that one by itself, the computer boots up. If I plug them both together, the computer just hangs.

So for now, it looks like there’s just an incompatibility with these two memory modules on this board.

The Optiplex Mystery

Another thing that I noticed is that the BIOS for this machine shows up as an Optiplex 160L. Let me show you that really quick.

So I went ahead and installed the memory module. I’m going to go ahead and turn on the power here, and it’s going to turn on and give me some output. You can see there it says Optiplex 160L. So this came out of a Dimension 2400 case, but it’s got a motherboard of an Optiplex 160L, or somebody flashed the BIOS from a 160L on this motherboard.

This computer is looking more and more like a Frankenstein of just clobbered together parts, but it does work. I looked up the Optiplex 160L and it has the same exact case as this. So it’s quite possible that they either flashed it with a 160L image and it just worked, or they replaced the motherboard with that of an Optiplex 160L when this computer was serviced somewhere.

I don’t know, but all I know now is that it is working. What I plan to do now is put it back in the case and install Windows 98 on this 16GB compact flash card.

The Spray Paint Makeover

Okay, so it’s been a couple of days and I was not really happy how the case came out looking after I cleaned it up with some soap and water. So I ended up buffing it up a little bit and then spray painting it black. I know that most Dells are not this black color. They’re like a gray purplish type of color. But since this computer has seen better days, I figured, you know, let me give it a try.

So I painted the internal chassis a little bit. And it is taped up, so I’m going to clean that up and take the tape off soon. I painted the back a little bit as well because that showed some oxidation. And it looks pretty good. I think the lighting here is a little bit off, but overall it looks pretty good.

I also painted this part of the cover. It was already kind of black, but like again like that sort of like purple color that Dells are. But I did keep this part that color. So let’s see, I’m going to try to put it all together right now and see how it all looks.

Assembly Results

All right, so here it is. It looks pretty good, actually. I wasn’t expecting this black color to work so well, but I really do like how it blends in with this Dell shade here. So I like it.

One thing that I did notice now is that I did have some spray overspray. I think I forgot to cover this grill here with some tape, but that’s okay. I’m going to live with that. I’m not going to paint the inside of this case. Although I could probably go overboard and just spray paint everything black, but I’m not going to do that since it’s not going to be seen.

So what I’m going to do next right now is install the motherboard, install the optical drive, and I was going to 3D print an adapter for my SSD, but I’m going to use this CompactFlash adapter which plugs in directly to the motherboard. So I don’t need to worry about having any adapter 3D printed for the missing hard drive chassis there. Let me go ahead and jump cut to having the motherboard installed with this on the board.

The BIOS Mystery Continues

Okay, so here is the motherboard installed in here. I put the fan shroud. As you can see, it’s on and that fan is running. I also have it connected. And this time around, it does say that it’s a Dell Dimension 2400. So let me plug in this keyboard here and see if it still displays that weird Optiplex 160 screen.

So I’m going to turn off the computer, turn it back on. It’s going to show the splash, maybe. Oh, now it says Dell Dimension 2400 series. That is very strange. I haven’t flashed this BIOS, I promise. And this is the same motherboard that used to say Optiplex 160. So that’s very strange. Oh well, that’s kind of a weird one.

Windows 98 Installation Begins

All right, so no device available. So now what I’m going to do is install this device right here. It gets power from the floppy connector, which I do happen to have. And I’m going to install the optical drive into the bay. This is the optical drive for the unit, and it looks like it’s a 48x CD-ROM, just a basic plain old compact disc reader. That’ll be fine because I plan to use my Windows 98 CD right here to install Windows 98 on it, the old-fashioned way.

Okay, so I’m here installing Windows 98 and I actually ran into some problems. It looks like the original optical drive in this machine is very flaky. So luckily I had another spare drive from a donor machine that I was able to pull out and it’s working right now. So I’m installing Windows 98 on that 16 gig flash drive.

Power Supply Failure

Okay, so guess what happened. As you can see here, I have the power supply out. At some point after I moved the CD-ROM up here, the next time I powered on the computer, I got a blinking orange light. And if you know Dells, you know that the orange light usually means there’s a power supply issue or an overcurrent or something.

So it was very strange. If I moved the CD-ROM out here and powered it up, sometimes it would work. And if I moved the cables up here, then it would turn orange. So I have a feeling that some of these cables are pinched or just old and crusty, or something is wrong inside the power supply.

At some point, I think I had the drive up here and it just no longer wanted to turn on. It was just always blinking or it would turn on and then it would suddenly shut down and go into blinking orange.

Luckily, I had one of these 400 watt CoolMax power supplies in my stock right here. And now, if I turn it on, it turns on. And it boots up. It’s Windows 98.

Success at Last

And I have to say, even though it has 256 megs of RAM only, these motherboards work really well. As you can see here with Windows 98, that was instant almost.

So as you can see here, I got everything running. I got almost all the drivers except for the Ethernet controller. I still have to work on that, and some kind of USB driver which is not necessarily needed, but for some reason I cannot find that one. I don’t know what it does. So maybe one day I’ll find out if I plug in something in a USB port.

But for now I have the typical stuff like Winamp, and I installed Flight Simulator on here. That actually works pretty well in this machine, as you can see here. Yeah, I’m going to call this one a success.

So right now, what I’m going to do is put everything together and maybe play a quick game of flight sim.