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Bringing up a Pentium system...

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commodorejohn

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So I recently nabbed a Packard Bell Multimedia D135 (Pentium @133MHz) from the recycle center to replace my 486, which went to a guy to whom it had childhood nostalgia value :) Aside from PB's horrible legacy support (you may recall from my rant thread,) I'm actually a bit surprised at how generally decent of a machine it seems to be; I know they'd acquired a reputation for cheap retail crap in their later years, but this doesn't seem to be bad at all. (Aside from the wonky design decision to use a PCI/ISA riser card, which results in vertical card slots in a tower case, but I expect that's probably a cost-saving move to reuse a desktop board?)

Anyway, the PB680 board supports Socket 7 Pentiums at up to 233MHz; this one came with a P133, but from a recent cleanout at work I got ahold of some P150s, and one of them is now installed, overclocked to 166MHz and doing fine. (Sadly it's Intel-only, as I also acquired some Cyrix and AMD Socket 7 chips.) It didn't give me any trouble about RAM, either (aside from the old matching-SIMMs bit,) so it's loaded up with 96MB 60ns EDO DRAM, which should be way, way more than enough for my purposes. Add in a PCI S3 video card, NIC, and an ISA OPL4-based sound card (not quite as good as an SB16 for legacy support, but surprisingly good all the same,) and it's shaping up to be a nice solid DOS/Win98 box; I've got a hard drive en-route, and I'm looking forward to getting this all set up :)
 
No pics, I'm afraid - the only camera I own is the one in my cell phone, and I'd be better off hiring ancient cave painters to draw a representation of a computer than using that thing.

Anyway, the hard drive arrived today. Install went well, except for the fact that even the updated BIOS doesn't support drives larger than 8GB :/ Honestly, that's probably as much as I'll need for a Windows 98 machine, but it bugs me on principle to lose 12GB of a 20GB drive...ah well, perhaps I'll get lucky with a better Pentium board in the future, and then I'll be able to reclaim it...

(Tangential observation: why is it that 20-80GB drives seem to actually be cheaper than 4-8GB drives? I didn't think I'd need 20GB, but it was just the most inexpensive option...)

Now I just need to dig up the drivers for the NIC and video card, and I'll be pretty well set!
 
Nice machine. My second PC was a Packard Bell Multimedia with a P-MMX 200, 32 MB RAM and a 2,1 GB hard drive. Ran Windows 95 fine. Do you know the exac model?
 
commodorejohn said:
So I recently nabbed a Packard Bell Multimedia D135 (Pentium @133MHz) from the recycle center
Click to expand...
It's good you were able to do so. Here in Madrid there are several so called "puntos limpios" ("Clean Spots", they are heavy in neo-speak here) where people can go and throw old junk, and many many old computers are disposed of there. However, if you try to go to the "punto limpio" and pick up some old computer or part someone has thrown away, they won't let you walk away with it.

The explanation: a "recycling company" has bought the rights to all that is left at the "punto limpio", and you cannot have any of it. Furthermore, the "recycling company" does not recycle the goods (as its name would suggest), but instead destroys them and recycles the raw materials.

It's so bad you would cry at the sight of all the kit you cannot lay your hands on and which is going to be destroyed in short order...
 
Yeah, that is sad...I don't mind when they're scrapping things that nobody wants, but I wish they'd understand more that some of these things people might still want. Even at the local recycle center (they're actually pretty understanding about this stuff, and sometimes even hang onto things they expect I'd want,) there's stacks and stacks of P4 boxes that could easily fill someone's computing needs, if only they didn't just tear the hard drive out and toss it into a heap.

It's not even like a lot of that stuff has much scrap value, but people have bought so completely into the idea that the only viable option is to buy a new machine that they never even consider the idea of reusing one - even though, even with the purchase of a new hard drive, they could save hundreds of dollars that way...
 
My recycling center is the same way, you can't take ANYTHING. I've seen everything from an old AST 386 to a Core 2 Duo there. Everyone is like "recycle!" when, in reality, you'll get more by letting people buy the stuff than you will just doing god knows what.
 
I had a PB 680 that I bought back in late 1996 and it sounds like what you are describing. It was a 166 MHz Pentium, 32 Mb RAM, 2.5GB WD Caviar, 33.6 Modem/Aztech Sound Card Combo, 8x CD-ROM, had a PBTV tuner and cost me $2500 without the monitor. Some models had the TV Tuner and others had USB. Mine had no USB – thank goodness because early USB tended to be buggy.

I loved that machine – there was noting “junky” about it; excellent value and reliability. It still works to this day, even the hard drive. I used it from 1996 through 2002.

Story for you: I also had a Packard Bell 560 with a 100 MHz Pentium and the Neptune Chipset that I got in I think either late 1994 or early 1995. It came with 8 Mb built into the board, and since it was a Neptune Chipset it supported caching on more than 64 Mb, unlike the amateurish (but still useful and respectable) Triton Chipset on my later PB 680. So me being a bit crazy (and I had a special CAD program that could use all I could throw at it), I decided to max out the RAM in it; remember, this was in 1995. 32 MB of RAM in 1995 cost about $1000, and I added 128 MB to the built-in 8 MB (soldered on the motherboard) - $4000 of RAM, on a $3500 computer. Two or three years later that much RAM cost “only” $400 – a drop of ten times.

Packard Bell was a good value – LPX is a strange and proprietary standard, but I usually just bought a new computer so I didn‘t care if the motherboard was upgradeable.

I also loved the high-1990s modern styling of the case, monitor and mouse, with its “ripples.” I had a 17 inch PB monitor and it was one of the sharpest I’ve even owned. There’s still lots of info on the web documenting these systems (with nice color illustrations and jumper settings) if you know where to look.

-Isaac
 
Yeah, I found a whole page on PB systems when I was looking up jumper settings for the overclocking. I don't know anything about x86 caching, though, so I dunno how this one compares to your old machine, but it seems fairly zippy for the time - it's mostly just throwing modern webpages at it that chokes it up.

I don't know from the bad reputation, either - I've heard a lot of people talk about shoddy build quality, but the PB systems I've encountered have been perfectly nice machines - indeed, the 286 I have is built like a tank, even for the AT period.
 
Oh, I know those systems. I still have the system my dad bought over 15 years ago.
I can't seem to upgrade higher than 133mhz on mine though but otherwise it's still a good box.

P9092105.jpg
P9092106.jpg

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The pass-through is just between the on-board video and one of the Voodoos... it's the way Voodoo1/2s are used, SLI or not, right?
 
Yes, Vodoo and some other early 3D video cards only did 3D - the 2D portion required you to use another card and hook up a pass thru. I had an Encore DVD card that let you play DVDs on a machine as slow as a 133 MHz Pentium. How can a 133 Mhz Pentium decode DVDs without dropped frames or slowdowns? Well it had a special add-in card that did the MPEG2 decoding in hardware. It also thus needed a pass-thru. Strange times.

-Isaac
 
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