Hi Folks,

I'm new to the Forum; I've posted a few times but thought I should also put up the specs of my new retro rig.

I got a couple of Compaq Deskpro's for nothing as they were in a non-working state, a 4000 233MMX & a 2000 200MMX.

Unfortunately the better of the 2 the 4000 is a no power up, it appears to have suffered water damage at some point the as the psu has rust around it 🙁

The 2000 booted but the HDD has smart errors & the ram caused random reboots, so I transferred the ram, cpu & hdd from the 4000 and managed to get a working system to build from.

t was a bit of a palaver getting the system partition that these machines need installed as I have a grand total of 12 Floppy disks & getting 2 that didn’t have any bad sectors on them so that the downloaded Diags disk images could be written to them was errrm challenging. I eventually had to do the old trick of drilling a hole in the side of a 720k disk to fool the drive into formatting it to 1.44mb to get by.

It's all up and running now & here is the current spec:

Compaq Deskpro 2000 chassis
Pentium MMX 233
64MB PC66 SDRAM
Onboard 1MB Trio 64 PCI VGA
Adaptec AHA 1200A UDMA100 IDE controller to get round the 8.4GB IDE limit (ironically the lesser models with the Intel 430HX chipset have a bios update for this but the mmx systems using the Via chipset don’t!)
Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 UDMA100 80GB HDD.
48x Memorex CD Rom.
Avance Logic ALS4000 PCI sound card.
2 USB 1.1 ports.
No NIC at present.
Windows 98 first edition COA so that’s what I have installed with all the rollup patches & USB mass storage support added.

It plays most of my DOS games well but I’d like to add a decent VGA card to it as the 1MB of the Trio is limiting in windows as some of the games want 2 or 4MB SVGA cards. I don’t know whether to get a 4MB Virge or to go with something like a 128MB FX5200, I'd like to keep maximum DOS compatibility.

The ALS4000 is ok too but I think I'd rather get an ISA SoundBlaster 16/32 for better DOS compatibility.

I also have a small wish list for 'Compaqness':

Compaq Slot loading DVD ROM
Compaq Netflex 3 or Netlelligent 10/100 NIC
Compaq LS120 Drive

I'll get some pics up Asap.

Cheers

Mark