Still Busy as heck...prepping for the move and fixing up the Gateway....
Went to Computer Surplus, whom previously told me they could watch out for CRT monitors because they can't recycle them anymore for some reason, all I had to do was give them my name and my number, so now I have, looking for a 14-15" SVGA monitor for the Gateway - the guy I'm building it out for I'm wanting to give a full retro setup.
Bought a few more things there
- They had an ISA NIC, 3COM, they were surprised they even had one
- IDE to SATA Converter, more on that in a bit
- An ATI PCI Video Card, I was going to use it on the Gateway, but it turns out it won't work because it's a 256MB Radeon with S-Video/Comp out, I thought it was a RAGE II era card, nope, mid 2000's
- PCI NIC, decided against using it in the end because it's just one more thing to take 100 years to get this build done, plus he's probably not even going top network it anyway, or at least use the network.
Then went to Goodwill
- picked up a used ASUS White-Front DVD-ROM for the Gateway
- picked up 4GB of DDR2 800 for my main desktop for $10 - now I am running on 6GB of RAM - and all my modules are gamer-level modules with a heatsink!
The Gateway.....that thing is one grumpy machine.....
So I tried the PCI Card, of course, did not work, then I looked it up and found out it was something like a Radeon 6250 PCI 256MB card....man, I would have killed for something like that for my Pentium III back in the day. So I put the Oak card back in, which is probably for the better, bumped the res up to 800x600, and setup a few of the Sierra Windows games on it. Also, the DVD-ROM I bought had been sitting in it's original box so long the drive could not spin up fast enough at first, so I decided to ggive it a good long brisk run with multiple CD-ROMs and so fourth to work that motor out, after taking it apart, putting it on it's side, spinning it up, and running it for awhile, it started to work reliably. I'm guessing the lubrication in the motor from the factory had not permeated the entire drive properly as it was not used for over 15 years (I think) because after that sideways turn it quieted down and started transferring files reliably.
While that was going on I finally upgraded the 286 to SCSI which is probably one of the lest problematic upgrades I've done in a long time. Now I have a nice big 1GB HDD and CD-ROM on it. Time to ditch those ZIP Disks, I just don't need them and it's a PAIN to have to have 2 IDE channels in everything just so I can accomodate ONE computer in my collection for large file xfers.
So the original multi I/O Controller was taken out and swapped with one missing the game and 25pin COM ports, allowing me to confiure the card to only work as a Serial/Parallel card (COM1, LPT1). Switched the Adaptec controller to all the defaults and that became the floppy and hard disk conrollers now. Found my 1.44MB drive died, so I swaped the old crusty Mitusmi with a more reliable Epson drive I had laying around. Put the Cd-ROM in the top. Powered on the machine, did SCSI Config on the on-board SCSI BIOS, wham-o, all items came up. Next installed DOS 6.22, setup Microsoft Network Client 3.0 trying to setup for my "Linksys" Ethernet adapter only to pull the card and realize sometime ago I put a 3COM EtherLInk III in there. Setup the EtherLink III for TCP/IP with a Static IP Address, took the original hard disk, popped it into a USB to IDE/SATA converter, and copied the files to my laptop, and then copied the files to the 486 running Windows 95. Then logged in via the 286 - and basically since yesterday it's been one big xcopy party since then - now with twice the capacity so now I can put ALL the stuff I currently have that runs on a 286 on there. Also, the 286 boots faster.