The eMachines 566ir is a computer I appreciate less for its capabilities, and more for the context in which it existed in the year 2000. Retail rebates that made it cost $0* to take home, plus the infamous claim of NEVER being obsolete! I’ve discussed this on LGR Tech Tales but I’ve wanted to take a closer look at one of the actual systems, and finding this one at VCFMW 2022 complete with all the stickers was a prime opportunity.
● LGR links:
● The 566ir restore CD-ROM is available for download here:
● All background music licensed from:
#LGR #Retro #computer
- Gamecarl
11.10.2022yeah
ThatLooksWhiteBut_IsBlackHispanicGuy
09.10.2022The first computer I had ran on DOS and I played games using a 5.25” floppy drive. I remember days where very few people had computers.
Brendan Ocheltree
09.10.2022farts.txt lol
James S
09.10.2022Can you upgrade this thing to windows 11? 🤣
HomieG Mcnuggetsauz
09.10.2022LGR "I can play this forever!"
turns off game 1 second later
Michael O
09.10.2022I bought my little brother one of these back in the day as his first PC (though his had an agp slot) . By the time I replaced it, I had put in a different CPU, a dedicated sound, network, and gpu card, a bigger hard drive and a bigger power supply. It was a total pirate hack together build by the end.
imaghostya
09.10.2022First pc I ever had (parents bought it) was a 466ix. Thing got the job done at the time but was sketchy due to the known bad psu. Ah back when a 40gb hdd was overkill. BTW i do still have the rounded cd-rom that came with it somewhere in a box.
Arnie's Tech
09.10.2022I also have a few 2000s machines in my basement. I MUST do a few videos about it 💪😁
Taycat
09.10.2022i literally owned one of these, or at least that keyboard, because i remember those dumb shortcut keys that never worked on my pc lol
LordShellington
09.10.2022Bro, you voided your warranty!
Anthony Long
09.10.2022I remember when Best Buy had the "signup for 2 years oc internet and get $500 instore credit" And they never checked anything but picture i.d. , I got 4 of these Emachines that way lol
SlowPCGaming
07.10.2022Commander Keen sounded fine to me. That is how I recall it sounding when I played it new. I used an AMD PC in a full server tower configuration with Turtle Beach expansion card. It stands at desk height, has 12 expansion slots plus 8 drive bay. About half of those are for optical and floppy drives. I bought it back in the early 1990s before Windows 95 was released. I still have the chassis which was later upgraded to a 200 MHz AMD with a new motherboard. I might have kept the rest of the internals. I'd have to go look sometime to see what all is in it.
Do the skateboard games ever properly emulate severe bodily injury from those nasty wipe outs?
Bendes _
07.10.2022I had this same kind of PC growing up. Trying to run games on it was just as miserable of an experience back then. Its also the reason i grew up on mostly RTS games. AoE and Starcraft ran on it perfectly
Tommy-boi
07.10.2022I remember using one of those as a kid. We still have it.
wrmusic
07.10.2022"Never Obsolete": Netscape.
Derick Silva
07.10.2022Man! Back then… As a 10 yo boy, I would have been such a happy boy with a machine like this!😀
All Alpha Zero Beta
07.10.2022Never Obsolete and Intel Direct Graphics? Those two stickers can not honestly be placed on the same machine.
Nordlicht
07.10.2022Oh we had an p3 with a edit 32mb ATI for playing unreal tournament.
DVDW Graphics and Crafts
07.10.2022My first branded PC from Y2K, a HP Pavilion 8760C, P!!! 733, 128MB RAM, 40G HD, 8X DVD+4X CDRW, 16MB VGA, had that array of nonsense shortcut keys on keyboard as well with dial knob volume adjuster. Upgraded to 768MB RAM in 2001 filling all the ram banks, thinking Bill's silly "640K ought to be enough for anybody."
"768MB IS WHAT ENOUGH IS!" –Me of then
TastyBusiness
07.10.2022I had the following model, the eTower 600is running Windows ME. It was pretty poorly specced out, and I hated that thing as a kid. We got the stock CD-R drive with mine, but it didn't come with the fancy curved faceplate.
TIBERIAN SUN?!?! YES!!!!!
Jarred Dean
07.10.2022That monitor is as old as I am good god
Arshad Ali
05.10.2022You know what no one misses? Being able to see your reflection on the CRT screen. Seeing you in the background reflected off the screen unlocked a core memory that I never knew I had, and as nostalgic as that makes me feel, I'm glad we don't do screens that double as mirrors when they're turned off anymore. 😀
googie
05.10.2022all celerons can go in the trash. P1 200 for DOS, P2 400 for the nostalgia pre-y2k build and splurge on a P3 Tualatin if you really want that pre XP build
alewis514
05.10.2022Poland in late '90s and early '00s was still in its infancy when it comes to democracy and free market. Obviously society was poor and high end stuff was very expensive, often measuring in multiple yearly salaries. So these cheap PC's were the only option for almost everyone. My first PC was from 1999 and it ran Celeron-333, 32 MB SDRAM and an integrated video processor that was borrowing 8 MB's off these 32 installed on the board. And it played games in software rendering at an acceptable framerate. Acceptable, as in – you can actually play the damn game. Idk how many frames per second. 10, 15, 20? Sometimes 30 i guess? Still was a giant leap forward from a bootleg NES console that was being sold on local flea markets for 10 deutsche marks.
Pirated copies of PC games were also sold there with bootleg localisations. I have some such gems on my HDD. For example Quake 3 Arena and Half-Life in Polish – with absolutely butchered grammar and amateur dubbing recorded by a guy with a strong Russian accent. Their audio recording equipment was about as good as those speakers.
Imagine hearing the initial HEV suit speech (when first picked up) spoken by a Russian dude recording this in his own flat near Polish-Belarussian border. Spoken in Polish, butchering just about every grammar rule you can think of. But hey, this was the only way to play Half-Life in Polish in 1999. Legal copy was too expensive (equal to a whole median weekly wage) and English proficiency among the society was still very low.
Ratus
05.10.2022I had this until like 2010 then I tossed it. No sata.
Vatolicious
05.10.2022Oh god I had this exact machine
Apexseals
05.10.2022soundcard and a voodoo 2 or a voodoo 3 in pci would be the go-to upgrades for something like this lol.
King Bat
05.10.2022I remember my mom getting an HP desktop computer in like 2002 that ran Windows Me. It was sold with a similar rebate tactic and we were locked into some MSN dialup for a long time until I installed an Ethernet card a couple years later and we were able to get broadband on it. My mom still has the computer in storage.
Hoffman
05.10.2022I'm getting flashbacks my time working at PC World in the UK when I had to upgrade these.
lander seven
05.10.20224:20 "hard on" at the 4:20 mark…. coincidence? I think not
Aquarian Dawn
05.10.2022My first dual core was an eMachine
Colonel Corn
04.10.2022I had one of these as a kid … my god I hated it … it was such trash.
Edit: That keyboard sounds better than the one I'm forced to use at work.
elitebuster2012
04.10.2022Maaaan I remember this exact PC setup when I was a kid, especially the keyboard and that button on the case
Ankur Mehrotra
04.10.2022UT99 was my favorite
MrNightshade2010
04.10.2022those instant "gift card" rebates …. they almost drove the big dialups straight to bankruptcy …………places like sears and other places were even using them to sell stoves and refrigerators
KytZu
04.10.2022This shit boots up faster than a windows 10 on ssd
Denver Starkey
04.10.2022even though this computer is not quite as old as my frist pc , it still brings back memories just seeing it.
by 2000 my house had already gone through 3 different PC's . and me and my brother were on our 4th pc. my 4th pc being the first one i built myself in 1999. suffice to say it blew the shit out of these emachines but costed me around 950 bucks altogether
AMD slot-A athlon thunderbird @ 850 mhz
312 mb system ram
20 gig hard drive
8x DVD burner (32x cd burner)
Sound blaster audigy sound card
and a Nvidia Geforce 2 ultra graphics card with 64 mb vid ram
it remained a pretty bad ass system till about 2001 when i upgraded the video card to a Geforce 4 4600 ti at that point the cpu was starting to be a bottleneck though.
Ben Shandrow
04.10.2022had almost this exact emachine sept mine was a celeron 700…i had a voodoo3b pci gfx card
Miki Cerise
04.10.2022I miss the days when computers came with cup holders.
QALibrary
04.10.2022The company that was/is in charge of the "never obsolete" insurance cover a number of years ago said they were down to 24>200 people (not 100% sure on the number) still paying the yearly for the insurance cover hence they must still be getting the "free" PC parts upgrade.
Lowlander 2004
04.10.2022But can it play Crysis???
Probably not…
QALibrary
02.10.2022The reason why PC come with stickers now and back then is companies pay the PC manufacturer to put them on the machine (that is also why you get all the free software installed on your new PC also) – from when I last looked Intel was paying the most for a sticker (depending on the deal) it was $5 to $20.
TN BN
02.10.2022But can it run Crysis?
Chewu
02.10.2022I had the 1.2Ghz CPU 256MB RAM 40GB version of this machine. I loved it, breaking Windows constantly and trying to upgrade the hardware for games taught me so much and ultimately got me interested in the IT space which has given me a great career.
I salute you eMachines.
DBADaddy
02.10.2022I had one of these. It was a decent machine once the astounding level of bloatware was removed. After I got a better machine I kept pimping this one, more RAM, bigger hard drives, odd things here and there, just because I could.
William Smith
02.10.2022Surprised by the graphics capabilities.
Agent Heracles
02.10.2022I believe these were like netbooks designed for limited uses. Still fun seeing this ❤.
adrian cronin
02.10.2022I had one of these. It would grind to a halt if I ever ran mcaffee on it. Fine with Norton, zone alarm etc. But it didn't like mcaffee one bit…one bit.
Kodykub
02.10.2022We had a few eMachines back in the day but I was a kid and wasn't into building pc's back then. I remember playing the Sims 1 on an eMachine.
Patrick
02.10.2022Gah i've missed you man!