Compaq 5304 replacement

[bettablue]

My Compaq 5304 is going to be be replaced. I have 2 complete Gateway tower systems that were given to me. Both have 19" CRT monitors, keyboards, mice ets. One is a PII and the other is a PIII. For the sake of building one of these Gateway systems up to act as a vintage gaming computer, and as a Tweener for storing my vast collection of original DOS programs, utilities, productivity apps and games. With these stored on the Gateway, I will have a 360Kb DSDD 5 1/4" floppy drive installed. We will also be adding another DVD ROM drive for accessing data stored on DVDs. One nice thing about the systems too, is that they both have internal 100 Meg Zip drives installed.

My question here is one of compatibility. Which would offer the most support for vintage hardware like the floppy drive, yet still allow the installation of a DVD ROM drive? The only real reason for having all of the hardware installed is so that I can write floppy didks to use with my IBM 5150 when the need arrises.

Whichever system we choose, I'll also document the build process of rebuilding this system to include on my web page at www.allthingsdos.com.

From there I'm beginning to think of our next project. How about a 5170 AT system with Model M keyboard?

As always, I look forward to your feedback and ideas.

Thanks again everyone.

 

[bettablue]

As replacements go, I got very lucky. I was given two complete Gateway computers. One is a P2, and the other a P3. Both were running their own installation of Windows 98, but neither would allow the installation of more than one floppy drive. So, after choosing the P2 as the new Tweener, the original 1.44 Meg 3.5" floppy drive was removed, and replaced with a single 5.25" DSDD 360Kb floppy drive. This was important because one of the computers' primary functions is to write diskette for use in my 5150 PC. a 233 Meg processor with 256 Megs of RAM round out the system. Other peripherals include a new DVD reader/writer, 100 Meg Zip drive, USB ports, and two hard disks. The first is 40 a 40 Gig Seagate, and the other is a 40 Gig Maxtore.

The first hard drive is for the Windows install and whatever software I want to run, and the other is for storing all of my IBM software, DOS installations, and games.

This is definitely a much better computer than the Compaq. I'll be giving it a good run over the next week.