Troubleshooting the 1996 Micron Millennia

Comments · 274

• IC

  @Ice_Karma · 3 years ago

  Be glad you were able to recover the system from having the wrong BIOS flashed so easily! Almost 25 years ago, my husband tried to update the BIOS and a similar thing happened -- several versions of the motherboard, not BIOS cross-compatible -- but that motherboard didn&apos;t have any way to recover from a failed BIOS flash. Fortunately, a few days later, he was going through a drawer at the place we both worked with some dead motherboards, and found the exact same model/variant he had just broken. He got permission to take the board, so he harvested the socketed BIOS chip and swapped it into his dead motherboard, and voilà! He was then <i><b>extremely</b></i><b></b> careful when he flashed the BIOS again. 🤣

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• YR

  @Yrouel86 · 3 years ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0cvNYAXtxc&amp;t=267">4:27</a> you most likely already know but if you don&apos;t, Necroware has made a VRM board to fit precisely in those headers

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• ST

  @stamasd8500 · 3 years ago

  I hadf a Micron Millenia as a work computer back in the late 1990s. It was a later version of the computer (PII-233, slot 1, 440LX chipset) but the case was identical. They clearly used the exact same case for several generations of computers. In fact, when my work computer was upgraded after a few years to a (IIRC) P4, and the old one was going to get scrapped - I asked if I could take it instead. And they gave it to me, minus hard drive. I still have the case and floppy/CD drives from it (the motherboard is long gone). At some point about 15 years ago I turned it into a hackintosh - put a motherboard from a G3 beige Mac in it. It&apos;s still in this configuration and still working to this day - yeah it has the floppy drive but of course that&apos;s not connected to anything. :)

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• DA

  @Damaniel3 · 3 years ago (edited)

  I spent my summer in 1998 working for the company that did phone tech support for Micron (a terrible job, by the way) - I troubleshooted more than my fair share of that exact model. &nbsp;I&apos;m a huge fan of those anodized passive heatsinks too - I&apos;m surprised I haven&apos;t really seen something like them in other brands of PCs from back then.

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• JE

  @jeffo3141 · 3 years ago

  Growing up in Boise, I had so many Micron computers and got to tour that factory at least 5 different times. &nbsp;Being between the ages 10 - 18 of It was awesome every time!

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• IV

  @ivanmaglica264 · 3 years ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0cvNYAXtxc&amp;t=96">1:36</a> - My first CDROM drive, exactly like that, the whole unit came out

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• GE

  @GeomancerHT · 3 years ago

  The CPU cooler looking like a grinder makes this PC awesome.

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• PE

  @peshozmiata · 3 years ago

  The out of the box experience was pretty good because of the Win98SE disc which came out in 1999. By that time 1996-era cards like the Vibra, S3 and Voodoo had been out for awhile and Microsoft could just bundle the drivers for them.

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• TW

  @twilliamc3 · 3 years ago

  That heatsink spin though. Love it.

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• AN

  @AnonymousFreakYT · 3 years ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0cvNYAXtxc&amp;t=370">6:10</a> - That CD burner is most definitely <b>NOT</b> &quot;standard for the era&quot;. 40x12x48 drives didn&apos;t come out until the 2000s (it looks like that precise drive came out in 2002.) Even CD-R 2x drives were rare in Pentium-era computers. Heck, the Plextor 8x CD-R / 20x CD-ROM read drive only came out in 1999, and CD-RW was only officially a standard at all in 1997, well after the Millennia was released.<br><br>That optical drive is an upgrade made at least 5 years after the system was released.

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• DA

  @dawnmitchell8213 · 3 years ago

  I’m amazed at the plethora of old tech I’ve forgotten about that I used to sell when I built custom PC’s back in the late 90’s early 2000’s. Apart from the occasional high end custom game PC I get requested to build I only sell Lenovo now for laptops, PC’s and servers. A custom UNIX server I built back in 2003 came back into my possession a few months ago when I converted it to a VM for my customer. I turned it into a DOS game PC using all the original hardware I built it with minus the tape backup drive.

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• _.

  @_..-.._..-.._ · 1 month ago

  Use to live near the old Micron PC’s plant in 90’s. Family worked there through the end of PC manufacturing and when it was spun off as MCMS. It was cool as a kid to use a Micron PC made in my town 😊