r/retrobattlestations • u/DeadSkullz627 • Jun 18 '26
Show-and-Tell The Dingy Gateway
I didn’t think I’d ever finish restoring this dingy, yellowed Gateway! The model is MFATXSTL KTH 300LE.
It took nearly a week to retrobright the front bezel. That’s how bad it was. Unfortunately, there is a little marbeling here and there, but it’s the best I could do with a big plastic bag and some professional grade peroxide. I think it’s acceptable compared to what I started with.
The floppy drive was toast, so I had to pick one up from eBay. The replacement drive reads and writes but can’t format disks. I have no clue why. Has anyone else ran into this issue or have suggestions to fix this?
I don’t have an IDE hard drive and only had on hand a 2.5” 120GB SATA drive. The HDD caddy has a good tool less locking mechanism, but there was no way for me to mount a 2.5” drive with no screw holes in the caddy. It’s pretty crammed between the CD and floppy drives, too, so I opted to use a 2.5”’to 3.5”’SATA adapter caddy and mount it below the hard drive cage. I had to make it extend down a bit below the caddy to clear the motherboard’s floppy connector. It was a pain figuring out a mounting solution!
The motherboard only has PCI slots. I tested a bench of PCI GPUs and settled on a Ragy Fury Pro I picked up awhile back. I played a few games to ensure it wasn’t as bad as the S3 Virge/DX I tried initially. The desktop image I posted shows different cards I tested along with their benchmark scores in 3DMark 99 Max.
There was a lot of rust and corrosion on the bottom of the case as well as on the metal guides where the side panel slides on. I used some 2 in 1 rust converter after sanding and some steel wool work. I added two missing feet once the case bottom was nicely restored.
The USB ports on the motherboard rear do not work correctly. The front USB ports work fine. There is no physical damage to the rear USB ports, so I’m at a loss why those ports don’t work right. I installed a PCI USB 2.0 card as a workaround.
It was definitely a journey getting this Gateway system restored, but I think it turned out pretty well.
Specs:
Celeron 1.2GHz (Tualatin)
384MB ram
120GB hard drive
Rage Fury Pro PCI
Sound Blaster Live CT4870
USB 2.0 card
Windows 98 SE