Frankenputer

What is a computer, anyway? Is it the CPU? If it is, then I've had several different computers in this box. Is it the box? If it is then the guts of this box have had more things in it than most. Is it the motherboard? If it is, then this machine has definitely been more than 5 different machines. For the sake of convenience, I'm going to go with the box. It's the lowest-tech piece of equipment in a computer, and things don't change much in cases. Yes, form factors are many and varied, but for the enthusiast market, there's only been two: AT and ATX.

As you might imagine, this is an AT case. It came into my life back in 1991 when I bought my first computer. I had always been a computer fan, but since I had squat for money most of the time and I was soon to be writing my senior thesis paper, I wanted a machine that could do it all for not much cash. I wanted to do word processing, and I wanted to be able to dial-up my friends' BBSes. I got my wish in a 386/SX something or other that my pal Peter put together for me. It came with Windows 3.1 on it and that was some pretty new stuff back then. I was typing into WordPerfect and dialing up with whatever comm program was good at that moment. I think I used Telix for quite a while, then I used Procomm and Procomm Plus. I remember when comm programs were the big deal because this was how you went out and browsed BBSes. That's what passed for dial-up services back in the day.

The monitor conked out on me after about 2 weeks so I got it replaced. I think I had that particular motherboard/processor combo for about 3 years. I nearly failed out of college for spending way too much time on IRC, I got my first taste of WWW'ing and I got my first emails with Pine. Yep, I was one connected dude with my 2400 baud modem. Life was good for a while.

As the relentless march of technology moved along, the 386 was a goner. I chopped it in with Peter's help on a low-end 486/DX. Again, it's been so long I can't remember what speed it was. It was slow, though. I was hoping for a big performance gain, but I was somewhat disappointed. I thought making the leap over 486/SX was going to do it for me in the long run, but I soon met the upgrade monster face to face. I needed a new video card. Got it. I needed more RAM, got it. I needed a faster modem, got it. Soon, I realized I was polishing a turd and just sort of left my beloved box sit for a while.

The next iteration was a stop-gap effort to get up and running again. I really wanted to get connected again so I popped for a faster 486 processor and some other ancillary junk. I needn't have bothered. Computers were starting to run Windows 95 and I just didn't have the system for good performance.

I'm sure my pal Peter will set me straight on this, but somehow I managed to upgrade again back in 1996. I popped about $270.00 or so on a new motherboard, processor, ram and eventually a video card. Boy, was that a lot of money. It was money well spent, though, as this was now my ticket to ride in the fast paced world of PC gaming. The motherboard was a good one and I was still using it up until a couple of years ago. Yes, it was slow. Yes I was back in PC poverty after a couple of years, but my box did for me what no other appliance has done for me before or since. It could be almost infinitely upgraded. The big processor was a Pentium 75MHz and I think I popped for 16Mb of RAM. This wasn't going to knock anybody dead with performance, but it at least made it possible to load halfway fun PC games and play them until the wee hours in the morning. I later sprang for a new PCI video card. Peter told me which one to buy and I nabbed it. I remember it being odd, walking out into the sun with what was going to be my ticket to ride for those early 3-D games. Castle Wolfenstein, here I come. Yeah, right. This was a significant purchase. It was the first PC peripheral I ever installed myself. Sure, I had done a bunch of modems, but they all had been external, and there was hardly a challenge in that. This one could have gone wrong in so many ways. It didn't.

I must have gotten cocky after successfully installing the video card, because I then tried to upgrade to Windows 95. My machine totally scrambled itself. Peter said he'd never seen an upgrade/ installation go so terribly wrong. To tell the truth, I've never seen one go quite so badly. Wow, did I mess that machine up. Peter, to his credit, was able to retrieve my personal documents and programs off of it, but it was time for the old scrub-and-reinstall. He did and I think that install might have lasted about 3 years.

Three years is a lifetime in the world of PCs. After this much time had elapsed, I was desperate for some more speed. I overclocked my machine. I bought a COAST (cache-on-a-stick) module, I reinstalled again. Nothing could slake my thirst for more speed except more hardware. That's not quite true. I just ended up doing my stuff late at night at work. They didn't mind and they also had a high-speed connection to the fledgling internet. By this time, I was working in the world of high technology (hah!) and I'd been maintain and installing machines at work for some time. I got sick of hobbling through life with a slow modem and a slow processor and a slow machine in general. Yep, time for another upgrade.

Mostly through scrounged and cast-off parts, I was able to put together a halfway decent machine. I upgraded to Windows 98 and spent real money on a decent video card, HDD, and even more RAM. I The machine finally ended up this stage of it's life as a Pentium 90MHz, overclocked to 120Mhz with 32Mb of RAM and a 500Mb HDD. I had an Intel 430FX chipped motherboard and I even had a USB card. Later, I caught a deal on a Pentium 166MHz processor and some more RAM. Yes, I was incrementally inching back to the leading edge of technology. Acutally, I was being dragged by what was left of my hair, kicking and screaming into faster equipment. This is the setup with which I entered into the new Millennium. No, it didn't pass the Y2K test.

I was busy last year in the spring working on this website. I needed more processing power to do my editing and coding, so it was off to the parts places, junk piles and EBAY to scrounge another motherboard and processor. I scored a halfway decent motherboard for cheap at a local parts place and I ordered a Pentium 233 MMX processor from a place I do a fair bit of business with. The machine finally went together last May and with a video card upgrade, I was ready to go. Unfortunately, Windows 98 had been giving me fits, so I had already upgraded to Windows 2000. When I stuck all the new parts into the box, I figured I'd give Windows 2000 a chance to get the job done. I powered it up with new RAM, a new processor, a new motherboard with USB and it worked like a champ after only one reboot. I had really kicked the pins out from underneath the OS and it came back swinging. From then on I was a Windows 2000 fan.

This machine is essentially the same today except it's no longer running Windows 2000. I'm using it as a development/learning box and I have a temporary, time limited copy of Windows NT Server running on it at the present time. Before that it was a Red Hat Linux box for about a week. It's also been a BEOS box, but only for a couple of hours. One has to try different things. It's funny to think it, but there is literally nothing inside the box that was there when I bought it. I've had to replace the floppy drive, power supply, several motherboards, several HDDs, 3 different forms of RAM, and it didn't even come with a CDROM drive. There have been at least 7 modems attached to this box either internally or externally. There have been at least 4 video cards. There have been serial mice and PS/2 mice. There have been USB peripherals, ISA cards and PCI cards. The box remains the same.

5/20/02

Went out and bought a new hard drive for this old bear. I was pleasantly surprised that the AMD K6/2 550MHz processor made very quick work of the installation process. Very quick. I'm going to dual boot Win98 and something else on it. The drive I bought was a 40Gb drive from Seagate. It spins at 5400rpm and can do ATA/100. I expect it'll be a handy thing to have around even though my machine only does ATA/33. Perhaps an upgrade card is in the works, no?"

3/9/02

I'd been running NT Server on this box with it's Pentium 233MMX and a board that only cached 64 of it's 256Mb of RAM. Slow is the word I'd use to describe it. Since this case is an AT, and I still wanted to use it, that left me with only a few options. I could have gone the AT/Pentium PRO way. The problem there was that I'd have to spring for more SIMM RAM. I have lots of DIMMs so that really wasn't an option. I could have gone with the Pentium II on an AT board, but with this you're usually limited to the FX or LX chipset. If I'm going to have a Pentium II or III, I'd want at least the BX chipset. So that really wasn't an option, either.

I decided to stay with Socket 7 and upgrade this box to it's end of life motherboard. I sourced a Chaintech CT-5AGM2 motherboard (OZZO-PMVP3A) and an AMD K6-2 550MHz processor. This is it for Socket 7. It doesn't get any faster. And fast it is. I was very surprised. This board runs at 100MHz on the front side bus (FSB) and uses PC100 RAM. Since it only has 512k of L2 cache, it can only cache 128Mb of RAM, but that's not such a big deal. I'm going to use it for the foreseeable future as a Windows NT Workstation. You don't need much more than 64Mb for that. It will accommodate up to 384Mb of RAM should I want to go nuts, but I doubt that will happen.

The PC with it's AGP card is pretty darn quick. As you might expect, it smokes a Pentium II 400 handily. It also makes quick work of a PIII 450 as well. This is quite a plus. I'm going to enjoy having this machine around. I may stick another drive in it and go with Win98 or something else to have a bit of fun with. Who knows.

So there it is. Frankenputer has an extended lease on life thanks to AMD and Chaintech.

By the way, if you hit this site looking for information about this motherboard, drop me a line with your questions.

June, 2004

Frankenputer is gone. In an effort to divest myself of all AT-based boxen, this one had to go. In the last year, it's been any number of things. I had the AMD in there for a while, but ended up scoring an Asus P2B-B board. I had it cooking with a 1.2GHz Celeron in a slotket for a while. That was pretty boss. During that time, I used it to test a batch of laptop hard drives, it was a Win98 machine more than once when I needed one, it was an NT server for a bit, it was several flavors of Linux and FreeBSD and eventually it was an XP Pro box. I finally ended up getting a couple of cheapie ATX boxen and so it was time to bid Frankenputer a fond goodbye.