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BINGO!!! Right at 6:30 you got into saying that you have been running Win XP on the machine. That's my problem. Whenever I try to install WinXP Professional 32 bit (NOT 64bit!!!!), Windows XP Setup halts at the "Windows XP Is Starting" screen immediately after it loads the first set of basic hardware detection drivers at the very beginning of XP Setup. There is no actual system HALT or BSOD or anything. The system just stops and freezes. If I do an identical Windows 7 Pro install on this machine, Win-7 will install just fine. So then it's back to wiping the disk on another machine so that it has no partitions, boot record, ...nothing, and going back to trying to put XP on this Optiplex 3010. As for installing XP 32 bit there are no drivers I can find anywhere at Dell, Intel or Western Digital and the disk I'm trying to install is a BRAND NEW Western DIgital "Black" 500 GB Disk. The disk itself has been tested and is fine. The ultimate goal is to put WinXP-32bit on a 64 GB Primary partition and format the remaining disk space later to make a dual boot WinXP / Win-7 machine. The only use this physical hard disk has had is that it has been tested on another Dell Optiplex 390 where Windows XP and Windows 7 setups have detected the disk and finished setting up perfectly OK as a beautifully configured dual boot system. It's the Opti 3010 like in this video that's the problem. I reset all boot options of the Opti 3010 to default values and have made sure that the BIOS config is set for MBR type boot record and the Disk Channels are setup as Legacy ATA. There is no other security configured in BIOS such as boot or admin passwords of any kind. This tells me that Dell BIOS should be wide open and free of obstructions and able to inform Windows XP Setup that my WD Disk is just a generic hard disk and then go ahead and provide the bus information for Windows Setup to find the disk and continue. So, is it possible that the remaining problem is maybe a memory config issue in the BIOS????? or the fact that someplace buried in the BIOS is a setting that needs to be disabled? If there are such options I can't find them anywhere in the BIOS. Intel, Dell and Western Digital websites offer NO help or driver downloads for WinXP 32 bit. as regards being able to find a SATA Mass Storage Controller driver for this machine that has an Intel 6 Series / C200 I5 processor. Obviously, Chipsets can be downloaded at Dell but they can only be installed AFTER the initial OS installation. The whole exercise is frustrating me because there must be a simple fix somewhere, but I can't find it at the Dell, Intel or WD websites. At this point I'm totally frustrated and at a dead end looking at a frozen blue window in Windows XP Setup that might just as well be telling me to GFY, which would be typical of Microsoft :D Thanks!!!

as someone familiar with every vintage and retro thing other than 8 track tapes and a portable tv its a gosh darn gameboy

Does it work on nfs?

Nothing going on Billy. My life is boring. 😢

Hello, I am working on one of these old computers for a woman that still uses it for an engraving machine in her shop. I have Windows 98 SE installed. But I don’t know how to go about finding a video driver for it. Any idea where I could get the video driver for this computer? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Do a review for Acer Aspire Emerald Green Computer, please?

Love that Windows version more than XP and others. Small, fast and strict. But if you want to install it on a large HDD (with more than 127GB capacity), you need to patch the installation CD (edit some registry values).

Wuaooooo pure nostalgic.. thank you 🥲🥲

Great video. Thank you for taking your time to share this with us

Gen Z and Alpha will be really scratching their heads on this one.

rare laptop lol

Try booting into the recovery partition.

Cannot help myself but it reminds me of the latter Win95 a lot…

If you can upgrade the RAM and get rid of the bloatware it should run pretty well after you create a new user profile and delete the old one. If you look at the Task Manager you will likely find some big wastes of memory being used my things you don't need on that system that load on start up. I loved the VAIO look, but they tend to have way too much bloatware installed that doesn't do much and really hurts performance.

$1000 for one of these on eBay right now, wow.

You should back everything up and replace hard drive for some reason i feel its getting ready to go

The last Big Mac I had was way smaller than the one in that Mc Ds ad. Interesting PC though designed around multimedia.

That speaker crack from the error at 7:20 made me jump, I had my volume up pretty high. 💀

Action Retro covered a very similar, but more feature packed model last year. His had a built-in TV tuner.

That is a great looking computer. Great find.

Good afternoon Billy. 😊

i gotta replace PSU on mine

Nice interesting PC Billy Coore! Sony VAIO is my favorite PCs I ever owned!

Out of all the PC brands, Sony made the best looking PCs. Sony left the desktop market when the Core 2 Duo began and sadly exited the computer market in 2014. I bought two Sony laptops and they have been amazing machines.

I'd love to find one of the cool era Vaio desktops. I have a Pentium 4 era vgc rb30 I found thrifting. Unfortunately the OEM graphics card and AV card where missing (I assume the previous owner kept them for some reason)

Oh wow! This is kinda rare to find. Very expensive AIO system from the day. I really doubt there's that many left in good cosmetic and working condition. This is something I will drool all over it. Due to the rarity of this, parts will be a bear to find. If you are able to get it apart, get a IDE to SATA converter and throw in a SSD. I really doubt a 20 year old mechanical will continue to function. Maybe you can image the current image or see if you can make a factory restore CD to restore to original configuration. If you do end up doing a teardown, make sure you make that video.

10:24 The fly must be a new recurring character.

Cool find and video, and LOL thick as that thing is, looks like a Early 2000's LCD TV with a keyboard slapped on it. Also LOVE the BTTF2 DeLorean, Please tell me it light's up :D

Hmm revivery partition might be built in

wonder if you do ssd upgrade on it?

Very interesting PC for its time. It looks pretty wide. Nice demonstration!

I had one of those back in the day, I wasn't impressed w/performance but the concept was interesting

Kinda looks like the supersized version of the mini Laptop VAIOs with either a 733MHz or 866MHz, one of those, Celeron SoC Sony did.

Fantastic piece! I would have died to have this back in the day... or even now, lol

Contact Sony in Japan, they still support them over there.

Hello, do You have WhatsApp?

Back in the Windows 9X and XP days, PCs shipped with a recovery CD and not a partitioned hard drive with recovery media in a partition like new PCs do.

It's surprising that when people donate old PCs that they don't wipe their personal stuff off the hard drive

I bought the Sony VAIO FX laptop from 2001 with Mobile AMD Athlon Processor and Windows XP. Note: when we turned on it comes back from hibernation.

Pretty neat! I remembered way back in mid-2000’s that my family had a Vaio laptop that looked good. But I don’t remember the model number unfortunately.

Hi, there is only recovery CD image of VAIO PCV-W30 in archives webpage. I don't know how big the difference is between VAIO PCV-W20 and VAIO PCV-W30.

IMHO VAIO more swanky than Apple stuff. Unfortunately, most SONY Software "goodies" are quite useless. Hard work to tweak these setups in a way you love to work with these retro machines. I did that several times already. My first laptop was a VAIO 17" in the year 2005 (?) by the way. SONY always delivered their consumer products with professional home editition MS OS. They also omitted Recovery CD, where you have to create them yourself from recovery partition.

I have an Vaio VGN-SZ160P but i couldn't find any recovery disk for it. Does anyone has an ISO file for it?