Can I upgrade my 486 PC?.



Sun, 29 Nov 1998 01:04:01 -0800

I need HELP. Well, maybe I ought to narrow that. I need some information regarding upgrades. I gave my old 486 Acer computer w/66 processor to my mother. Yes I do love her, she didn't have any computer at all. Well any way, it now has a 56k modem, about 32ram, but no real space on the hard drive. I've been told if I replace the hard drive with, like, a 5.1 gig it will be exceedingly slow because its only got the 66 in it. Can you just upgrade the processor with little fuss? What is the minimum to replace it with? Thanks Troll

Troll; I think that a 120mhz is the fastest that will handle, if you can find one to fit. 2 gig should be plenty for the HD but it depends on your BIOS, if it will handle it or if you will have to partition it, or can go into LBA block mode ????anybody else, Randy (pinkhamr)

I think that if you replace the crowded hard drive that is in that machine with a newer model, it will be faster than it was, because the newer hard drives have faster seek times and perhaps faster transfer rate. She won't know it is slow, because she has nothing to compare it against.

Now, if you get a 350 Mhz PII to put alongside it, then it will be slow, assuming that she does thins with it that will show the speed difference. How much faster can she type than the 486 can display? You probably will have to partition the hard drive if you get a big one, because most older BIOS's just don't have the ability to support the large sizes available now. You may want to just add a second smaller hard drive instead, plus you can save a pile of money sometimes by doing that. (rmorrison)

Troll, your 486dx2/66 will handle a larger drive, if the BIOS is an early type and limits the size of hard drive, then you will have to use a disk manager such as W.D.'s Ontrack. This will slow it down a little, but if you watch the drive you put in, you can choose one with an access time of 10 milliseconds and not loose anything over the older drives at all, they were commonly 15 millisecond and slower access times. I would give your mom a 32 meg upgrade on the RAM for a total of 64 meg, you will be surprised what that would do for it. You may wish to just find another compatible drive and slave a second one in.

upgrading an old dinosaur PC



cilent1 (0) on 04/12/99 at 16:59:18 PDT

Help!! I am upgrading an old dinosaur for my wife to use. I need to upgrade the hardrive. I only have one IDE slot which is being used by the harddrive and CD-ROM (just added) Is there any way to add another drive or do I have to replace it? original drive is 256meg, how much more can I add to this computer, 1 or 2 gig or more?

tjcc (414) on 04/12/99 at 17:05:20 PDT

client1 - are you sure you want to upgrade that beast? New computers are a lot cheaper than people think. When you are all done upgrading that thing, what will you have??

cilent1 (0) on 04/12/99 at 17:21:41 PDT

tjcc, I know it's probably a waste of time, but I just got a dell 500mhz that I'd like to keep my wife off of. she only really surfs the net anyway, and I'm having fun tinkering with this thing. I'd rather tinker with this than my new machine. as I'm sure u can tell I'm new to this but I'm learning a lot. computer was a 486/33, I upgraded to an old pentium 90 chip and put 40megs of ram on it added a sound card, 56k modem, windows 95 and CD-ROM. not much for an expert but for someone who didn't know how the hell to even take off the cover I've come a long way.

mshefflr (33) on 04/12/99 at 18:24:22 PDT

client 1: Does your sound card, by any chance, have an IDE port on it? If it does, you could hook the CD-ROM to that, and would free up a slot for a spare hard drive, or could use drivespace in win 95 to make it bigger. I've talked to a guy who is using a 486 33 with a drive spaced 300 meg hard drive to run his business, and surf the net via AOL too, if you can believe that.
I'm looking to upgrade my 486DX66 to at least a PII 266 and wanted to know the difference in the AT, ATX mb's any help would be appreciated.

sdmike1 (132) on 09/14/99 at 11:23:44 PDT

bquizmaster - The main differences are board layout and power connectors. If you want to use your existing case, you'll need an AT board. With an AT board the parallel and serial ports can be put anywhere because they're cable connected, and the power supply in your case uses AT plugs for the MB. ATX uses a different power connector, and the ports are built into the board in such a way that you should have an ATX case with the cutouts in the right place. I'm not sure anyone makes an AT PII (slot 1) board.

dadorsey (21) on 09/14/99 at 11:36:41 PDT

sdmike...Yes, AT boards are made for PII; I have a Pii 350 in a AT case...Dave

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