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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sidney Reilly who wrote (355)	3/11/1998 11:48:00 PM
From: Zeuspaul	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

>>I have a 486 66MHz...What should I consider before I do the upgrade?<< As a frame of reference ...for $599 you can have a new 200MHz (Cyrix) with 32 MB RAM and a 2GB harddrive..CDROM..sound..at Microcenter Computers mei-microcenter.com Hopefully we will get some other input on this. I will give you my two cents. I doubt you will be able to upgrade to 586 without changing your motherboard. If you can upgrade it may be in name only. I doubt you will be able to get any significant performance increase with a processor upgrade. 24 MB RAM is substantial for a DOS/Win3.1 based machine running spread sheets and word processors. The most I would do to this machine would be to add the harddrive and maybe bump the RAM to 32 MB if there is an available slot. Most likely It will only support 540 MB harddrives (hard to find). If the computer does not support bigger harddrives there are work arounds. You could put in a 1 GB drive and then partition it into two smaller drives. You might be able to add some RAM to the video card and if it is an option.. cache on the motherboard. Are you running Win 95 and what do you use the computer for? We have discussed uses for outdated computers. One of the better suggestions is to network it to the new machine and use it as a back-up device. It could be used for backing up files or a backup system for Internet access when your new machine is on the blink. Green Machines... I think all machines are green today. I believe government mandates require energy management. I spend an excessive amount of time trying to keep my machines awake. It seems that I am forever trying to find a configuration screen that will enable me to keep my computer on. I wouldn't mind except that sometimes they get up on the wrong side of the bed!..requiring cold boots to get them back up to speed(:{) I have two 486 33 computers (240 MB harddrive and 8MB RAM @ $2500+/- each) and I will not put a penny into either of them. Regards Zeuspaul

To: Sidney Reilly who wrote (355)	3/12/1998 6:28:00 AM
From: Spots	Respond to of 14778

Bob, a few questions: What do you mean your computer "went under"? Did a major component fail? or is it dying under its load? or what? By VESA bus you mean the VESA local bus (very long cards)? What kind of case is this (tower, mini tower, desktop)? As Zeuspaul says, if this is a VLB or ISA machine you can't put a 586 class chip on it. About the best you could do is put on a (so-called) 100mhz chip 486 class chip from AMD or Intel. That would only give you about a 50% boost, and you'd almost certainly run into some kind of problem (timing, voltage, something). I bet you're motherboard documentation is terrible (all of mine sure are). I support 3 of these things (486's, that is), one of my own and one for each of my daughters. Mine runs WFW 3.11 in 16 meg. I use it for file backup and to support some old Win 3.1 software (haven't had a call in years, but can't drop the dern thing). My daughters both run Win 95 in 24 meg, and it still churns along fast enough for their purposes. I won't put a nickle into any of these, but they are serving useful purposes as long as they keep going. If anything dies, it's spare parts. You can add a disk, though. All of the major EIDE disks come with mapping software which will allow you to run a big disk (>540mb) with an old bios. If you have a VLB machine, the bios probably supports a big disk anyhow (look for LBA Bios parameter). As Zeuspaul says, you can always partition it (which you have to do anyway if it's over 2gigs).