First post, by flupke11
- Rank
- Oldbie
I like desktop cases. Not so much as I like dual processor systems, and half as much as I would like a dual processor desktop system, but still.
I needed a proper Windows 98 pc for playing Magic The Gathering, which refuses to run on anything NT-based.
Nostalgia alert! In 1999, a Pentium II 233 was my workhorse at university, so restoring an i440LX system was a blast from the past.
A few years back, I scored this Unisys for €10 locally. I liked the simple but sturdy look, and the case badge. Aquanta rings strangely in my ears, as to me anything watery should not flow too close to the computer crowd.
Nice side note on the side:
The previous owner did like his/her football (soccer) and wasn't particularly partisan, as the teams these players played for are seen as arch enemies. Or he/she was just a fan of Belgian banks.
The players do hint towards the time frame in which to situate this system, and the back reveals the manufacturing date to the exact day in august 1998.
The plastic hinge at the back sports a hard drive cage. Quite ingenious, as it is fairly easy to install the HDD, but mind that it's not made as a removable cage. So it's not a case of one good tug we'll loosen it.
DLX600041-Z is a Unisys-style numbering, I presume. The insides are all Acer.
Time to open it up. It originally came with a PII 266, passively cooled and 32 MB of SDR. No AGP slot, as the onboard ATI 3D Rage Pro with 4MB SGRAM takes up that position.
Here we see that the mainboard is a V65LA, made by Acer in Taiwan:
The good people at Unisys were so helpful to include this label on the inside of the cover:
First thing I did was upgrade the ram with 128+64+32 = 224 MB of PC-100 SDR in the three slots.
The mainboard was very, very picky. I went through most of my SDR-sticks before I got to this configuration which was correctly identified. I blame the very old bios for this.
Secondly, I replaced the PII-266 with a stock intel cooled PII-333. I tried all my slockets with all my 2.0V Celerons, but none would work in this board. Back in mid-2000, I upgraded my PII-233 to a Mendocino Celeron 533/128/66 and was amazed at the speed difference on my old Asus P2L97. Unfortunately, no go here, again probably due to the very old bios.