New Zealand Vintage Computer Forums

Got the PC General 486 at sparrows fart this morning. Popped off to work for a hard days yakka, came home had dinner, after which I connected the beasty up. Confirmed the fdd wasn't doing what it should so swapped it for another and all's good to the floppy department. When I pulled the old one I noticed a "rattle" so took the top cover off to find a small, well 2cm by 1.5cm by 2mm thick peice of plastic. Looks like a tab off something. Tested the old fdd and it's reading disks again. I won't refit it though. It has a DS0/DS1 jumper so can be used on other systems that require one or the other.

Next was the cdrom. It wasn't showing up in explorer. It's running Windows 95b. Easy fix-just run add new hardware and it's there. Tested it out with a MS Home Musical Instrument cd.

Bit of a let down really. I was expecting a bit more of a battle. Turns out the hdd is 240mb item. Reading the documentation the original owner was contemplating a 386sx40 machine but changed their mind, getting a 486dlc33 instead and later upgraded that to a 486dx2, which I haven't positively I'D yet. No indication from looking on the top of the cpu which is covered by an unmarked heatsink. No tweeking had been done in the bios and there was a noticable speed improvement with both level 1 and 2 cache enabled. A bit more fiddling to do but that can wait for another day. It does have two vesa lb slots and I do have a vesa lb video card and multi i/o card doing nought.

Changed a few more bios settings and now it's displaying both the CPU- a 486dx2/66 and level 2 cache size.

caluser2000 wrote:Bit of a let down really. I was expecting a bit more of a battle.

lol, know exactly what you mean there.

Good work on getting the BIOS sorted quickly, and it's awesome that caddy CDROM still works - single speed? I have a twin speed Creative that detects (needs a Creative plug on the sound board) but wont read discs - a spider came out of it while I was using it - so I suspect it needs a clean.

Will you keep 95B or change it?

I believe the cdrom is a single speed-Model 523 One of the early SB Combo packs I'd imagine. It's connected to a SB Pro card. I'll leave 95B on it as it's running without much bother at all. Certainly on par with my OS/2 v3 box. I'll edit the registry to remove any of the POs details obviously. There isn't much installed at all. Just the generic win9x install with some dos shareware games-Mahjongg, Wolf3D, Commander Keen and a few others. Some nice dos quiz games on it as well. Looks like the PO stored the important stuff on floppies.

It's nice having all the original print outs and system selection docs. Kinda ties everything together. When Windows 95 was installed someone took the time to type out a power up and shutdown procedure for the original owner. The machine originally shipped with MS Dos 6/Win 3.1/MS Works, 4megs of ram and a 240meg drive in August 1993. Looking at hand written notes the complete system may have cost in the region of 4 grand with sound card/cdrom, printer, mouse and monitor.

I remember when I bought my 286 I had the option of getting a system without any OS installed at all. That cost around 2.5 grand in 1992.