It's a dinosaur !

[vicki lynne]

Hi, Ya'll. I'm dealing in antiques now. I have a 1995 Space Walker pc.
It has an Award Modular Bios V4.50 pg with an Award plug and play bios extension v1.0A. I managed to get 65mb. of ram, and a hard drive big enough to hold windows xp. Now, I used the xp boot floppies to load all the necessary files to set up xp from the cd-rom. My question, this bios doesn't know what a cd-rom is, and doesn't have the option to boot from a cd-rom. Do I have to change the bios chip? If I do does it have to be an Award bios chip? And just what kind of havoc can this wreak with my motherboard? Can I drive it insane to the point of sitting there with it's fingers in whatever it uses for ears going la la la la ... ? I anxiously await input. Thanx in advance.:D

[saphalline]

What era is it? Socket 5 or 7? What type of RAM? Any markings on the mobo itself?

No, you can't just plug in any old BIOS chip. It has to be the correct BIOS for that mobo configuration. You'd need to get that from the mobo manufacturer (if they still exist). Does the mobo work at all?

[mjc]

I wouldn't even ATTEMPT XP on that thing...

Sometimes, machines of that era had the CD drives hooked to a sound card, or more commonly, a SCSI card (if the SCSI card had a BIOS chip of its own, then they were bootable). ATAPI CD drives weren't all that common. You can, of course, put a modern CD drive on it, but it won't be a boot device.

You probably have a Shuttle board with an i430FX chipset...Pentium, socket 7, AT format, right? Probably limited to an 8.5 GB hard drive. I would say your best bet would be to install either a bootable SCSI card and CD drive or transfer all the files to the hard drive by hooking it up to another computer and copying the install folder over...but be warned XP is going to be a real snail on that thing IF it even loads. That board was basically designed for Win95 and worked pretty much OK for Win98...

Oh, yeah, there may be Y2K issues with that board too...if you have the option, in BIOS, to use the long date format...use it.

[vicki lynne]

Wow! O.k. Here's what I know for sure. The mobo is a socket 7. It has four slots of 72 pin sim ram. Markings on the mobo, it has a rather large C E in the center of it with 96c-oo6o. thats all I can really see on it without shutting it down and tearing into it. I guess that answers the question of whether it works or not. It booted up and through bios to the hdd, but I got "operating system not found" So, I was gonna load an os and throw a bunch of games on a couple of old hdd's and give it to the daughters of a friend of mine for their first computer. Something without too much invested in it so if they did manage to somehow manage to tear it up it's no big deal. Ya know? Speed isn't really an issue, they're 7 and 9.
The board has only that large C E and then a little away from that is printed 96c-0060. XP just happens to be the os I have on hand, so again convience. I wasn't really having unrealistic expections, just using what was to hand. I'll try the scsi card I have one or two of them on hand.
Thanks for your input.

[Fruss Tray Ted]

You're going to waste a $100+ OS on a computer worth maybe $5?????????

At least you'll have 30 days to decide if it's worth it...

then another 30, then another, and another... :p

[vicki lynne]

yeah, basically it's a hobby and spare parts. Besides, they could wreck it in 30 days.:p

[mjc]

So, I was gonna load an os and throw a bunch of games on a couple of old hdd's and give it to the daughters of a friend of mine for their first computer. Something without too much invested in it so if they did manage to somehow manage to tear it up it's no big deal. Ya know? Speed isn't really an issue, they're 7 and 9.


Well, if that is what you are going to do...I'd say try Linux. There are a number of distros that wouldn't be a whole lot of work to put on there and there are bunches of 'cute' little games that kid that age just love (I know, I've got 'em that age and they rather play the linux games..go figure). Add in AbiWord or OpenOffice (if I were doing a 'kids' only machine, I think I'd stick to AbiWord...)

A couple of the games...SuperTux (http://supertux.berlios.de/) and FrozenBubble (http://www.frozen-bubble.org/) have Windows ports and run quite nicely on XP

[vicki lynne]

I must look into this Linux thing. I, myself, have only been playing with computers for a little over a year now. As you already know, I'm definatly still learning. Thanx for all your help.

[saphalline]

Oh, I didn't catch the fact that you were going to put WinXP on that thing! :eek:

Yeah, don't do that. It doesn't matter if you don't care about speed - we're talking about a sheer inability to run that OS! It's not that it would be slow, it's that it just wouldn't work at all. Min specs for WinXP are 233MHz CPU and 64MB of RAM. Keep in mind that these are the minimum specs, and I haven't had much luck with them. Generally, the slower the CPU, the more RAM you need. And less than 128MB of RAM is not recommended at all!

With a mobo like that, you're limited to 64MB of RAM. Maybe 128MB if you're lucky. And you're looking at a max CPU speed of 233MHz (again, if you're lucky). I'd put Win98 SE or Win 2000 on it if I were going the Windows route.

[vicki lynne]

Can anyone suggest a link or something to give me a basic idea about linux? There seems to be a lot of different names of linux and unix based systems and I'm kinda confused.

[SufferWell1396]

http://www.slackware.com
http://www.centos.org/
http://www.debian.org/
http://fedoraproject.org/
http://www.gentoo.org/
http://www.knoppix.net/
http://www.mandrivalinux.com/
http://www.redhat.com/
http://en.opensuse.org/Welcome_to_openSUSE.org
http://www.ubuntu.com/

:p just a few
they are all free, by the way

[azzey]

http://delilinux.de/

Deli Linux is known for having a very small footprint and is designed to work on older hardware (currently running on my grandma's old Pentium 133 with 16MB of RAM)

[mjc]

I'd probably go with Deli on that machine...load it up with some of the Educational/Kids stuff and then let them have fun...

[vicki lynne]

Thanx again everyone. I appreciate all your help.