Re: Older PC with larger HD's
- From: Rick <rickajho@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2006 12:19:48 -0400
David L. Beem wrote:
Hi Rick
Only 2G? That seems odd for a Pentium motherboard. EvenTo me it seemed more like a FAT16-derived number. My general take is
the 486 boards I've used allowed for up to 8.4G hard drives...
that once you were through the 512Mb barrier it was easy sailing until the
8Gb waves. BIOS manufacturers (and Phoenix did pretty good at the time)
usually follow what the chipset capabilities were. That can often provide
more data (reading & saying here the numbers of the few large chip on the
motherboard), or motherboard markings in addition to listing the BIOS.
I was thinking that too, but didn't want to "go there" regarding the 2G
per partitions FAT16 limit, since the OP didn't say what OS he was
running. You can find MP3 players that will work even with plain old
DOS. He said the BIOS was placing the limitation - not the operating
system.
Even a clone SOYO Pentium board I have, which has a CPU speed support
limit of 233 MHz, doesn't have any BIOS limits on hard drive sizes. I
put a 20G hard drive in that thing and the BIOS recognized it just fine.
It's just puzzling to think that there may be an early pentium class
board out there with a 2G hard drive BIOS limit - but anything's
possible.
It will also tell what the CPU potential is. Even though there is
motherboards that will stop at a P166 (and non-MMX, as my recent work with a
Gateway "Thor" motherboard) that seems an odd number to me too. Bill might
be better to get up to the MMX (166 is the bottom end of that), even though
it introduces the two voltage supply, his motherboard, or one he could
easily find would do it.
I'm a little more liberal than "just work with the system without
upgrades" these days, especially with such low-cost parts available. A
common form-factor AT or ATX motherboard can be replaced so easily by a
better design (say the same capabilities otherwise, but the abilities to run
DIMMs instead). No, I'm not talking about the upgrade escalator to go to XP,
but enough of a system to take it over the top of running W98SE very well,
rather than W95 ordinarily (as everyone knows, typically put as much RAM as
you can on the older systems).
I've been meaning to ask this question for a while: What's a reasonable
OS to put on a Pentium 233 MHz MMX CPU system with only 96 MB RAM? Win
95 ran on it ok. But is this just too slow and not enough RAM to
reasonably support Win 98 or Win 2000? (I've seen Win 98SE run dog slow
on Pentium III 800MHz systems with 128MB RAM)
The computer I still do 99% of my work on is a 486VLB system with an
80586 processor installed, running DOS and WFWG. But there are those few
times when I can't do something there - like access my bank web site
with Netscape 4.08. And I have a camera that uses a driver which won't
support anything less than Win98SE and uses USB. If that camera didn't
use a TWAIN driver to transfer images I could still get by with Win 95
or even one of the DOS USB drivers out there to access the images on the
camera. But not when it uses TWAIN to perform image transfer. 8-(
If you had a to choose between Win 98SE and Win 2000 on a computer with
those limitations... which one? It's not meant for extensive use.
My "real comuter" was an IBM A21m lap top with Win 2000 that I did this
stuff on. Until it suddenly died. Lot of IBM lap tops out there - mostly
A2x and T2x series - that suddenly seize and won't power up. Or if you
can get them to power up they lock up every 15 seconds, every two
minutes, maybe you get it to run for 5 minutes... (It's already been to
an IBM repair center for assessment so I don't need diagnostic tips.
Just Google "dead IBM Thinkpad" and you'll see what I mean.) Seems to be
a problem with the power management hardware and the only recourse is to
replace the main board in the thing. IBM wants $995.00 to repair a lap
top that cost $799.00. Sigh...
Rick
Funny, because I am getting an EduQuest set up to run a SCSI 3-disc.
Aiwa changer (more like a Sony CD large tray, with the discs on the same
plane rather than an NEC multi-disc in 5-1/4 factor). I want the ISA bus
(for a radio card) & probably will only need WFW311 (the Aiwa program is
16-bit), but I'm not trying to do anything fancy. And MP3 playback would
probably be limited.
David
David@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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