"Vintage" PC upgrade....

[Johnny Ray]

I'd appreciate all your comments/suggestions.

At work, I have an old, reliable IBM350 P100 (Pentium 100 cpu) with Windows 3.1 that runs some scientific equipment (a Beckman HPLC). It has served us well, but in the way we're currently using it, it is much too slow at processing data. Beckman will sell us a software/workstation upgrade for $10,000 (!), which is way out of the question. As a quick, easy fix, I tried an EvergreenTechnologies 200MXpro (only $50), which is based on some AMD chip. Unfortunately the scientific software won't run with this chip. It just crashes giving a floating point error. Everything else is fine. Keeping in mind that the DAC, drivers, it's configuration, etc. are all proprietary, so I really can't put a computer together from scratch, what are my options?

Can I just swap the Intel Pentium100 for a Pentium200? I forgot where the voltage change happened with the Pentium line...was it with the MMXs?

What would the likelihood be of succssessfully moving the harddrive (or using DriveCopy to a bigger one) and the ISA DAC to a new system and having it work? Are the IRQ, DMA, etc, for Win3.1 set only in config.sys, autoexec.bat, etc. The entries in these files for the equipment are very cryptic.

Thanks for any suggestions.

John

[Rags]

The dual voltage thing happened with the MMX chips.

Rags

[cjolley]

Win 3.1 was before Plug & Play so, the DAC card will have a hard wired IRQ.
You need to be aware of the HD size limitations in DOS pre-Win95.
And be aware that some of the drivers & software may have timing issues running on a much faster computer.
If you have an install disk, you might be able to run Win9x on the new system.
How many ISA slots does the new computer need?
As long as you do your experimenting with a copy of the old hard drive, it's hard to imagine how you could hurt anything trying.


My vote goes to:
1, Copy the old drive to a 540MB partition on a new drive.
2, Install the new HD & the old vid card and DAC in a faster computer.
3, Give it a try!

chuck

PS I would love to hear how 3.1 does on a 1Ghz machine

[SteveC]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by cjolley:
PS I would love to hear how 3.1 does on a 1Ghz machine </font>

Well -I tried win 3.1 on an PIII-550 wither 128mb a little while back and my GOD did it fly! ~3 seconds to load from the typing of WIN.

[SteveC]

Oh and Johnny Ray - check what multiplier setting you have on the board. If it's the IBM PC I think it is, then the most you can get is a P-133 in it. IBM cases have the motherboard jumper information on a big sticker on the underside of the lid - check that.

If you can get a 2.5x or even a 3x multiplier for the 66mhz bus, you could put in an intel P-166 or P-200 (NON MMX!!!) if you can find one.

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Cheers,
Steve

"Life is what we make of it, yet most of us just fake"

[Johnny Ray]

Thanks everyone for the suggestions.

Since the Evergreen\AMD chip upgrade didn't require a motherboard jumper change, I forgot that long-ago the Pentiums were not multiplier locked. I think that the maximum jumper setting on that motherboard is 100, so it sounds like my only option is the DriveCopy approach.

Thanks again.

John

[cbman]

Yeah... but its hard to find the NON-MMX cpu's unless you are willing to look... my fiances dad updated his work machine and it took him almost a month to find a suitable chip (200 NON MMX)

He ended up getting one on ebay...



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