First post, by Joakim
- Rank
- Oldbie
I have received a soft spot for old Compaq computers and I recently acquired a Compaq Prolinea 5120. There is not too much information about these computers online, but from what I understand 5 means Pentium, 120 is the MHz. A 460 would be a 486 60 MHz if that speed ever existed.
Mine is a slim version so I guess it should really be called 5120e, but the model naming does not seem to be very consistent, or it is a marketing thing.
There are some variations of the motherboards, it seems like some models have l2 cache on COAST module where 256 kb is inbuilt in mine. Mine also have 6 SIMM slots where 4 are populated with a total of 32 Mbytes of ram.
The CMOS battery was a coin cell one, but it was soldered. I removed it and added an external battery using some Dupont wires and tape (lazy).
There is a riser card where most action happens. I have 3 Isa slots where one is shared with a single PCI slot. There was a 3com NiC in the PCI slot when I bought it. I also added a sb16 pnp card because I had it laying around.
The hard drive came in a caddy which occupied 1 of two 5.25" slots. I removed this and installed a cd rom drive (teac 8x) which I think was a nice fit.
I don't seem to be able to activate the second ide controller, maybe there is an IRQ problem, so I added th CDROM to the same ide cable as the hard drive. The harddrive is a Seagate 850 mb drive, possibly original.
The HDD is quite loud and somewhat scratchy but it works. It contained an installation of windows 3.11 and some drivers for the nic. I'm not too familiar with windows 3.11 but I will try to set the network drivers up correctly to do some file sharing with my other machines.
This is the oldest machine I have and possibly ever owned and I will use it mostly for DOS gaming. I might consider an alternative storage media later, but I'm not in a hurry.
Edit: I wrote DIMM but meant SIMM.