First post, by jas4500
Hello all, I've frequented this forum for quite sometime now and it has helped me out countless times. I've never really had a reason to post anything until now, as I could usually find an answer to whatever either on this forum or somewhere else. My grandfather gave me his old 486 Compaq Deskpro XE 433. Everything works just fine including the monitor. It's already had some upgrades in the past; the RAM has been expanded to 24mb and it has a 840mb hard drive taken from another computer. It also has Windows 95 installed on it.
I wanted to upgrade the CPU (i486sx 33mhz to i486dx2 66mhz), add a sound card for DOS gaming, and possibly replace the 5.25 inch floppy drive with a cd drive. For a sound card, I wanted something with general compatibility with most DOS games. I was thinking a Soundblaster 16 or AWE64, but I'm not sure what advantages or disadvantages there are to either of those, or which models are better or worse. Right now the computer has "Compaq Business Audio," which I believe is integrated, but I'm not sure. It seems to only support Wave based sound. As for a cd drive Ive been reading some other threads on the topic and I think I need an IDE drive and then set the drive as a slave to the hard drive? I've heard conflicting information on that and I'd like to hear if anyone has any experience in that matter. Thanks in advance for any help or advice.
System Specs:
Windows 95/MS-DOS 7.0
80486sx 33mhz
24mb RAM
840mb Hard Drive
Compaq QVision