Had a look in the bag this evening and it looks like all the original manuals are with it - for the I/O and graphics cards, the PC itself and the monitor - sadly, nothing specific to the motherboard. It looks like the monitor is its original one and it also has its original keyboard and crappy speakers with it too. Doubt the serial mouse is original but it came with one all the same.

The sealed software is all children’s educational stuff along with a copy of TFX and a Corel Draw package.

Scandisk reports that the hard drive is unfortunately toast presumably as a result of opening it so a new one will be on the cards soon.

this was a great find (with great price!) and if not 'new' then it seems likely it wasn't used that much judging from your description & pictures

CF and the RAM will make it an excellent candidate for win 95 / DOS mid 90's things

Nice! How did you repair the traces? I have a 386 motherboard that does POST but the keyboard doesn't work. I think the battery leakage destroyed some of the traces.

CPU alone is worth more then £1.20!
Will be a fun project to turn into a gamming PC.
What's it got sound and video wise?

Win95 is a Pentium Class CPU operating system.
It will not run good on a 486dx2-66

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2021-07-26, 15:48:

Win95 is a Pentium Class CPU operating system.
It will not run good on a 486dx2-66

A 66mhz 486 with plenty of ram, fast storage and a graphics card that can accellerate Windows graphics is not that bad in Windows 95.

For pure nostalgia I prefer Windows 3.11 but even an old win95 setup can be pretty fun to play around with 😀

What graphics card is it in this machine?

thats the pc layout I run windows 95 with 2 disks: one for the OS other for swapping thus decreasing latency and if a ISA VLB hard disk controller is used they also come in 2 port IDE meaning up to 4 disks; or 2 on separate lanes. (i like 2 master modes on separate ribbons) of course a soundcard with IDE for cdrom as to not slow down hard disk lanes (don't know if that happens with SCSI ) 😀
A SCSI VLB whoah that would give the hard disks mag wheels!
Looks like a quantum 270mb hard disk I have one still but mine is 4gb. But is that SCSI or IDE? max capacity per disk i think is 500mb IDE on that system.
4mb xms good to start but if possible i recommend 8mb or 16mb and a tident ISA VLb GPU with 1 to 4mb vram would be a good investment if seeking a fun experience with windows 95 titles. Windows 95 B i recommend over 95 original it has fixes.
Glue I don't see on cables in general I wonder if its a warranty or quality assurance.
The cleanliness of the photographed tech this is a very good aquisition reminds me of fun times i wish fun times for you.
ISA VLB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VESA_Local_Bus

OSkar000 wrote on 2021-07-26, 16:53:

A 66mhz 486 with plenty of ram, fast storage and a graphics card that can accellerate Windows graphics is not that bad in Window […]
Show full quote

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2021-07-26, 15:48:

Win95 is a Pentium Class CPU operating system.
It will not run good on a 486dx2-66

A 66mhz 486 with plenty of ram, fast storage and a graphics card that can accellerate Windows graphics is not that bad in Windows 95.

For pure nostalgia I prefer Windows 3.11 but even an old win95 setup can be pretty fun to play around with 😀

What graphics card is it in this machine?

^^^ What he said. The majority of system in use when the first version of MS Windows 95 was release were in fact 486s. Give it at least 16megs of ram and it will be happy as a sand boy.

zapbuzz wrote on 2021-07-26, 16:57:

thats the pc layout I run windows 95 with 2 disks: one for the OS other for swapping thus decreasing latency

Yah that's a good trick to remember for windows and linux machines, if you can put your swap on a spare disk, even if the disk is half the speed of your system disk, your system will run faster. Also comparative to storage space, swap space is not all that much, so consider even "small" disks for the era, for instance, I had a 10GB quantum fireball (back when they didn't just stick fireball on everything and it meant fast.) and right from XP thru 7 that was on an XP2600 machine, that used a 500GB drive. The fireball was a 7200 drive and did about 40MB/sec whereas the 500GB did 60MB/sec (Sustained speeds, not "here's 3 kilobytes but now my cache is empty." speeds)

gerry wrote on 2021-07-26, 08:25:

this was a great find (with great price!) and if not 'new' then it seems likely it wasn't used that much judging from your description & pictures

CF and the RAM will make it an excellent candidate for win 95 / DOS mid 90's things

Thanks! No apparently not used much at all. Shame the original drive is dying really.

Half-Saint wrote on 2021-07-26, 09:39:

Nice! How did you repair the traces? I have a 386 motherboard that does POST but the keyboard doesn't work. I think the battery leakage destroyed some of the traces.

For the traces I used legs snipped off through hole components (which are in abundance on my desk 😁 ) and just scraped back the mask and soldered the legs over the breaks. For the vias I enlarged the hole slightly and soldered the legs to the traces through the hole. If your battery is in similar proximity to the keyboard connector I'd bet that's probably the issue.

chinny22 wrote on 2021-07-26, 14:41:

CPU alone is worth more then £1.20!
Will be a fun project to turn into a gamming PC.
What's it got sound and video wise?

I hope so! That's the plan anyway. Video wise I think it's got a Trident card (will have to go and have a look which one) and for sound it's got an SB16 Value.

zapbuzz wrote on 2021-07-26, 16:57:

thats the pc layout I run windows 95 with 2 disks: one for the OS other for swapping thus decreasing latency and if a ISA VLB ha […]
Show full quote

thats the pc layout I run windows 95 with 2 disks: one for the OS other for swapping thus decreasing latency and if a ISA VLB hard disk controller is used they also come in 2 port IDE meaning up to 4 disks; or 2 on separate lanes. (i like 2 master modes on separate ribbons) of course a soundcard with IDE for cdrom as to not slow down hard disk lanes (don't know if that happens with SCSI ) 😀
A SCSI VLB whoah that would give the hard disks mag wheels!
Looks like a quantum 270mb hard disk I have one still but mine is 4gb. But is that SCSI or IDE? max capacity per disk i think is 500mb IDE on that system.
4mb xms good to start but if possible i recommend 8mb or 16mb and a tident ISA VLb GPU with 1 to 4mb vram would be a good investment if seeking a fun experience with windows 95 titles. Windows 95 B i recommend over 95 original it has fixes.
Glue I don't see on cables in general I wonder if its a warranty or quality assurance.
The cleanliness of the photographed tech this is a very good aquisition reminds me of fun times i wish fun times for you.
ISA VLB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VESA_Local_Bus

The CD-ROM drive isn't IDE but the Panasonic interface from the SB16 which thankfully works but is a bit annoying with drivers. The HDD is IDE - I've tried a spare 20GB drive in it this evening and the BIOS seems to recognise it as 8GB.

Tonight I have got MS-DOS installed on there with Ontrack disk manager and loads of FAT16 partitions so far. I'm thinking of sticking with Windows 3.1 on It after all if all goes smoothly so next will be to get that and the drivers all installed. My other builds are all "period correct" (ish) so may as well stick to that with this one even if the first computers I remember using were all Win95. Maybe I will revisit that plan once the RAM and CF adapter come.

still see these on the market very cheap too and no trim I feel retro sick think i'll have to build something soon

zapbuzz wrote on 2021-07-26, 18:28:

still see these on the market very cheap too and no trim I feel retro sick think i'll have to build something soon

That backplate is exactly what I've been looking at - this is my only build with no USB for file transfers so would be a huge convenience and 486 friendly too

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2021-07-26, 15:48:

Win95 is a Pentium Class CPU operating system.
It will not run good on a 486dx2-66

Memory is the more limiting factor. Windows 95 is designed to kind-of work with 4MB of RAM. The use case is something like: You can run at 800x600 pixels, 256 colors, start wordpad, type a small text file, look at the clock in the task bar and experience no noticeable jitter due to swapping. 8MB is the actual minimum requirement to do "useful stuff" like running Office 97. And with 16MB you should have a nice swift experience even with multiple programs running at the same time.

Of course, stay away from true color, web browsers, full-screen animation and other fancy stuff. There's a reason that dragging windows with contents, wave files for system events or animated mouse cursors were not in the base operating system, but included with Plus!. If you skip all the Plus stuff, a 16MB 486DX2-66 is quite capable of running Windows 95.

Nice one.
Be sure to coat the copper traces with something to help protect them, a thin coat of solder would work.

Also, luck that you got a heatsink with those little clips, heatsinks for my own little project was a bit of a nightmare.

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-07-26, 18:11:

zapbuzz wrote on 2021-07-26, 16:57:

thats the pc layout I run windows 95 with 2 disks: one for the OS other for swapping thus decreasing latency

Yah that's a good trick to remember for windows and linux machines, if you can put your swap on a spare disk, even if the disk is half the speed of your system disk, your system will run faster. Also comparative to storage space, swap space is not all that much, so consider even "small" disks for the era, for instance, I had a 10GB quantum fireball (back when they didn't just stick fireball on everything and it meant fast.) and right from XP thru 7 that was on an XP2600 machine, that used a 500GB drive. The fireball was a 7200 drive and did about 40MB/sec whereas the 500GB did 60MB/sec (Sustained speeds, not "here's 3 kilobytes but now my cache is empty." speeds)

A good thing to remember is to run them on separate channels of the IDE controller so they don't have to share same bandwith. Or maybe that's only theoretical in 486 world?

H3nrik V! wrote on 2021-07-27, 08:50:

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-07-26, 18:11:

zapbuzz wrote on 2021-07-26, 16:57:

thats the pc layout I run windows 95 with 2 disks: one for the OS other for swapping thus decreasing latency

Yah that's a good trick to remember for windows and linux machines, if you can put your swap on a spare disk, even if the disk is half the speed of your system disk, your system will run faster. Also comparative to storage space, swap space is not all that much, so consider even "small" disks for the era, for instance, I had a 10GB quantum fireball (back when they didn't just stick fireball on everything and it meant fast.) and right from XP thru 7 that was on an XP2600 machine, that used a 500GB drive. The fireball was a 7200 drive and did about 40MB/sec whereas the 500GB did 60MB/sec (Sustained speeds, not "here's 3 kilobytes but now my cache is empty." speeds)

A good thing to remember is to run them on separate channels of the IDE controller so they don't have to share same bandwith. Or maybe that's only theoretical in 486 world?

yes separate channels are faster 😀

I feel like the 486 would do fine in windows 95 to be honest, I’ve run it before on a P75 with 16MB and that was actually really snappy so I’d be hoping at least usable (with the additional ram).

I’ve tinned most of the exposed traces but need to pull the board back out anyway so I’ll do the rest then.

All the drivers are now installed and it's now happily running Win3.11 again with 20GB storage space on the hard disk.

On the plus side, the chassis hasn’t cleaned up too badly at all - you can see how yellow the plastic is though compared to my socket 7 machine on the bottom:

At the moment I'm using an IDE-USB adapter to transfer the files straight to the hard drive, following the instructions here to use with Ontrack: https://msfn.org/board/topic/177754-mounting- … k-disk-manager/ - bit of a hassle but it works great, will have to have more of a think about it and probably switch to a CF card backplate. Maybe I'll try win95 on it too, 3.11 was before my time but I'm having fun playing around with it.

So on the to do list:

64MB RAM when it arrives (have had to disable Smartdrive to get anything to run until then)
Retrobrite the front panel?
CF card?
Tin exposed traces around battery
Sort battery
Something better video wise (VLB card?)

You can use clear nail polish to protect the exposed traces I've done it alot it's fast and easy and keeps the copper traces very well protected.

britain4 wrote on 2021-07-27, 09:59:

I feel like the 486 would do fine in windows 95 to be honest, I’ve run it before on a P75 with 16MB and that was actually really snappy so I’d be hoping at least usable (with the additional ram).

with the 64mb ram you have coming i'd agree, i also had win95 on a p75 once and it was fine. It may be 'slower' on a 486 but it will still do all the expected things ok, you're not going to be trying late 90's games on it after all (well, might be fun to see what happens!)