X-Authentication-Warning: delorie.com: mail set sender to opendos-bounces using -f X-Recipient: opendos AT delorie DOT com From: "BOB KLAHN" To: opendos AT delorie DOT com Subject: MiniScribe Message-ID: Date: Thursday, 13 Apr 2006 00:42:00 -0500 X-Mailer: Internet Rex gateway (2.29) X-Fido-From: BOB KLAHN, 1:123/140 X-Fido-To: ALL MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Declude-Sender: ccoky AT iglou DOT com [67.131.57.16] X-Declude-Spoolname: 98444015.eml X-Declude-RefID: X-Note: Please send abuse reports to abuse AT fewpb DOT net X-Declude-Note: Scanned by Declude 4.4.0 "http://www.declude.com/x-note.htm" X-Declude-Scan: Outgoing Score [9] at 12:27:17 on 02 Jan 2010 X-Declude-Tests: BADHEADERS [8], DYNHELO [2] X-Country-Chain: UNITED STATES->destination X-Declude-Code: 8010000e X-Declude-Recipcount: 1 Organization: The Electric and Water Plant Board of the City of Frankfort Kentucky X-Identity: 67.131.57.16 | | delorie.com Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com Originally to: ALL Forwarded from Classic Computer. Just cause it seemed appropriate. ... KW> I bought a $500 Celeron 533 system in 2000, then a 1.1 GHZ KW> chip for $40 in 2003, a new ATA-100 hard drive in 2004, and KW> just recently removed the guts in 2006 and replaced them KW> with a $25 P4 motherboard, a cast-off 2.2 ghz chip, and KW> 512MB in new RAM. My first pentium was a 533 mhz celeron EMachine. Cost $200 closeout at Office depot. Upgraded the ram and hard drive, added a TV card, but it's otherwise standard. My step son is using that now. KW> As for classic computers, I'm considering an experiment - KW> running DOS only for a month and seeing what all of the KW> upgrades have really gotten me in terms of productivity KW> gains. I found a copy of DOS, packet drivers, email, web, KW> and 1-2-3, but I got rid of all of my older systems! I'd KW> love to find a working VLB 486 system with 8-24 megs of KW> RAM, that's what I used in 1993 or so when I first KW> discovered the internet. That sounds like my last 486. Started out with a sx 25mhz. 4 meg ram and 160 meg HD. Ended with a VLB, Intel overdrive 83mhz pentium upgrade, 32 meg ram and a couple gig HD. Recently almost revisted that time. Some years back I bought a 486 DX2 66 from a surplus outlet. Don't remember who now. It had 12 meg ram and a 210 meg HD. Had it in my storage locker for a couple years. Recently I fell into 4 72 pin sims 64 meg ECC.(error correcting.) I looked them up on the web, and the writeups said they may or may not work in a computer that doesn't use error correcting. In my storage locker I had an Intel Overdrive CPU, which boosts a 486 to an 83mhz pentium. Of course I have several low gig Hard drives lying around. The logical conclusion was to change a 486DX2-66 w/12 meg ram and 210 meg HD into an 83mhz pentium with 128 meg ram and a 2 gig HD. So, I settled down and took it apart. First thing I found was the HD was wiped. So, I had to reload dos. Which would not be a hard thing, but the CMOS battery had died, so it lost it's settings everytime I turned it off. Since I was mostly doing hardware work that was frequently. Then it did not automaticlly detect the hard drive. Some will, I have a 486 laptop that does, all I have to do is reset the date and time. And that only if it's off for a couple days. I was doing this on the original Hard drive just to get it working before I hit it with the 2 gig job. So, every time I started it I had to go through the HD setting in the CMOS. Ok, I finally got dos running. Then I checked the ram. ECC ram is supposed to be installed in pairs, this thing had two sockets, so I installed two. Bzzzzttttt... No go. Won't even try to boot. Ok, so I'm gonna do just the hard drive and the CPU. Only thing I had forgotten. The boards that are compatible with the Overdrive CPU have an extra row of pins around the normal CPU. That's for the pentium functions. No extra row. So, no extra ram. No upgraded CPU. All right, I can just do the hard drive. Only I realized, if it didn't have automatic hard drive detect, it probably didn't have LBA. So the over 500meg HD won't work. I could use a boot utility like Ezdrive, but, about this time, I decided to use the recycle bin instead. Not too long after I remembered, 72 pin ram was fairly late in the 486 cycle, so it may have LBA after all. But I didn't bother retrieving it. Still got 256 meg of 72 pin ECC ram. And an 83MHX pentium upgrade for a 486. All I need is a use for it. And a good dose of enthusiasm. BOB KLAHN bob DOT klahn AT sev DOT org http://home.toltbbs.com/bobklahn ... 1st law of computers: No such thing as too fast or too much memory. * Silver Xpress V4.5/P [Reg]