A happy old PC...

[mboconnell]

I picked an old PC, clearly already upgraded several times:

The case belongs to a generic 386, (with the ever-cool TURBO! button)

ASUS mobo, P1 133, 64Mb ram, no optical drive, 2 hard disks (1G & 3.5G)

A great man once said "There's no kill like overkill.""

So I added a 200MHz P1 processor, a 40GB hard disk, a 60GB hard disk, a DVD-RW drive, a Zip drive, a USB II card, and an ATI 128mb PCI video card. Also, several fans (the single fan in the PS wasn't cutting it).

It seems like a hamster driving a bulldozer, but it works well enough!

 

[Quadraman]

I picked an old PC, clearly already upgraded several times:The case belongs to a generic 386, (with the ever-cool TURBO! button)

ASUS mobo, P1 133, 64Mb ram, no optical drive, 2 hard disks (1G & 3.5G)

A great man once said "There's no kill like overkill.""

So I added a 200MHz P1 processor, a 40GB hard disk, a 60GB hard disk, a DVD-RW drive, a Zip drive, a USB II card, and an ATI 128mb PCI video card. Also, several fans (the single fan in the PS wasn't cutting it).

It seems like a hamster driving a bulldozer, but it works well enough!

Are you sure the case was 386? I remember 8088/8086 and some 286 machines having the turbo switch to go from 4.77 to 8 mhz. I don't recall the 386 having switch selectable speeds.

 

[chris]

Quadraman: My 486 has a turbo switch.

 

[JRL]

My 486DX2 also has a turbo switch too.

 

[benjgvps]

Oh the turbo switch, reminds me of the computer my family had until 3-4 years ago. Ran Windows 95 and had dial-up. I loved that turbo switch, it made me smile because it was always on with the mini LCD that tells you the wattage went up.

 

[mboconnell]

I originally thought it was an infrared interface because all I saw was the black square. Whoever upgraded it to a pentium just pulled out the wired to the LED display, when i plugged them back in, the selector switch changed if from 20 to 33 which is what told me '386' I didn't think they made 286's that fast, or 486's that slow.

 

[Quadraman]

Why would a 386 or 486 need a turbo switch, though? Don't they run at the full rated speed all the time? i know mine always did. I used to build all my 386 and 486 boxes and never had a turbo switch.

 

[mboconnell]

I think it depended on what kind of board you had, default was full speed (unless you told the bios otherwise), there was a jumper/header for the switch that told it to run at some fraction of the clock speed. The idea was if you were running older software that used ticks instead of seconds to time something, you could get a better approximation of real time.

 

[coius]

Pentiums up till the MMX models could have turbo switches. It's actually still available in some MMX Laptops. Generally either "Full Speed" or "Compatible" which could run in a lower-speed mode. Great when playing those older games that seemed to speed up to warp speed when you don't want it to

 

[mboconnell]

Ha!

Great when playing those older games that seemed to speed up to warp speed when you don't want it to

I have a floppy disc version of Sim Earth for tandy & compatibles, i popped it in my PIII 933 and it zoomed right through 1,000,000 years at a time.

 

[quinterro]

I originally thought it was an infrared interface because all I saw was the black square. Whoever upgraded it to a pentium just pulled out the wired to the LED display, when i plugged them back in, the selector switch changed if from 20 to 33 which is what told me '386' I didn't think they made 286's that fast, or 486's that slow.

I do recall that 286/20mhz processors were made. One of my brother's friends had one, but I never used it. The 486 processors started at 25mhz and went to 100mhz (intel) or 133mhz (AMD). The 133mhz was was nice, especially with one of those motherboards that had PCI slots on it.

The two numbers sound right for a 386 though.

 

[Aoresteen]

So I added a 200MHz P1 processor, a 40GB hard disk, a 60GB hard disk, a DVD-RW drive, a Zip drive, a USB II card, and an ATI 128mb PCI video card. Also, several fans (the single fan in the PS wasn't cutting it).
It seems like a hamster driving a bulldozer, but it works well enough!

What? No dual floppies 5.25 & 3.5 with a Q80 tape drive? Keep adding!

Where's the SoundBalster card? How much RAM?

What OS are you using? It will run W2K!

 

[mboconnell]

Hahaha!

I don't have a PC 5.25 floppy any more. I have an IOMEGA ditto tape drive (80MB!). Its a 'standard' 3.5' drive, but it has an extra 'bump' so it wont fit in one of the floppy bays and allow me to have a floppy drive. Its a mini-AT case, so there are only (2) 5.25 bays.

its got 64MB of ram and a SoundBlaster AWE32 (i think).

I really wanted to keep the ISA soundblaster card because it is universally compatible with almost all my old DOS games. Plus, PCI slots are at a premium, sound doesnt need PCI.

I am running a straight install of WIN98 SE, with the unofficial SP1.

I don't want to run W2k because it will slow it up a bit, Win98 is relatively peppy.

What I really want now is an ISA rom card. I found a Mac emulator program online and I want to get the card and add LC, LCII and LCIII roms to it so I can emulate 68000, 68020, and 68030 processors with it. Sometimes its good to have both platforms at once because I have photoshop for Mac, and not for pc ($$$!)

I dont want to get TOO crazy because it only has a 200W power supply, and I'd hate to blow one of those, especially since I would need to find an AT replacement (getting harder and harder)

Right now, its down and out until I can figure out how to update that BIOS, the 60G hard disk doesn't do a whole lot of good if the mobo can only see 8G of it.

 

[benjgvps]

Neat, yours had an LED display too! Thats probably what it was displaying, the CPU speed...Thanks for bringing me down memory lane!

 

[Aoresteen]

Right now, its down and out until I can figure out how to update that BIOS, the 60G hard disk doesn't do a whole lot of good if the mobo can only see 8G of it.

Go to the drive's MFG site and see if they have a copy of EZDrive. That will fix the 8 gig limit without a BIOS update. I have P1 MOBO that suffers from the 8 Gig limit and EZ Drive works well. For more info on size issues see:

http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_drives/drive_size_barrier_limitations.htm

 

[iamdigitalman]

nice. I got a older gateway with an AMD athlon that I intend to rebuild and install vista on. It's 800+ mhz, so it just makes it. I just need an ATX power supply, and I am in business. I might also get a new case for it, or build one, as the original is in pretty poor shape. But then again, real computer users leave the case open!!

Oh and I remember my dads old 486. He hand built that machine. It started life as a lowly 286, then got a 386mobo, and finally he got a 486 for it. It was a DX 66mhz IIRC, and the case had a turbo switch, which worked. It halfed the speed to 33 when it was off, so we left it on all the time. It ran 95, and was working up until 2002 when I killed it trying to rewire the AT power supply (those damn switches)!! He went out and got a nice HP kayak that lasted for 3 years when he got one of those rare BIOS viruses that killed it. But that thing ran very nicely with XP, and had a 550mhz P3. One of the old slot one carts!!

-digital

 

[mboconnell]

The only thing those slot 1 processors were good for was recycling! There's a little more gold, a little more aluminium, a little more cash value.