First post, by gladders
Hi folks 😀
I have a long-term plan to build my own Windows 98 machine and some people here have given me some stellar advice, thanks to all of you.
But while procrastinating this week I stumbled upon an eBay offer for an old Amstrad 5086 IBM compatible. The appeal of the thing to me is that it looks, case-wise, to be precisely the first ever PC I ever had, which I inherited from my grandad when I was a nipper in the early 90s. As to whether it's precisely the same, I can't say, as the 5286, 5386 and the 7286 seem to have very similar cases which could also be reasonable candidates.
Anyway I am sorely tempted to impulse-buy the thing. It's a basic 8086/88 8MHz with 640k RAM and a working 40MB HDD (I distinctly remember it having 40MB back in the day!) and comes with Counterpoint, which was a GUI I remember toying around with back then, when all my friends had Windows, haha.
The only flaw I can see is the 750k floppy drive, rather than the standard 1.44MB.
So, would you guys say it's worth the plunge? It would certainly make a convenient low-end machine to play those ancient DOS games that depended on the processor speed to be 8MHz, and I intend to convert the HDD into solid-state and floppy drive into a Gotek or somesuch in the future. Would complement my W98SE machine nicely!
But are there any dangers I'm missing - were they seen as notoriously unreliable, inferior, or anything? Or changing the battery? What about expansions - it has two free bays - anything worth getting for it?
Thanks 😀