Hi Judyth,
I see that Heimo and others already answered a number of
your questions. I'll add my opinions.....
Hard Drives:
Don't use an older MFM or RLL drive in the 486. It is
not worth the trouble if you have other options such as
the Seagate 40M drives you mentioned. If these drives are
indeed IDE, that is.
Tell me the model number and I'll send you the info on
them in a jiffy.
RAM:
If the RAM is 30 pin then you will need 4 at a time, so
don't bother with the "extra" 1M from the 286. Leave the
286 more usable.
A 486 needs 4 chips per bank. You only need to fill one
bank, in fact you may not have more.
1M chips are free, or a nominal price, nowadays. If you
have 8 slots, (2 banks) then that is a great way to go
pricewise. If you only have 4 slots, then you have to
decide if you want to go with only 4M (using the cheap
chips), or if you want to pay real money to get 4M chips.
Last I saw, those were 10 to 12 dollars around here.
Note that there are some idiosyncrasies with ram and
motherboards. Some boards want parity, some don't care.
The speeds may have to be close. Some won't work with
others if you are using mixed chips. It generally works
out pretty easily though. I just didn't want you to think
that _everything_ would work. <g>
CD-ROM:
Older and slower ones are a good buy. They are not so
slow when it comes to just transfering files.
Think about the interface. IDE is easiest and just plugs
in like a hard drive to the controller card. The down side
is that you will not be able to add another hard drive.
(Newer boards can take 4 IDE devices though)
Other interfaces, like Panasonic, Mitsumi, Sony, etc,
are a bit of a nuisance because they require a special
interface. This interface is sometimes a seperate card or,
more often, provided on a sound card. Watch out that you
have the right card for the drive. I have seen many older
drives being sold without the card and they are basically
worthless that way. It is not always easy to tell the
interface without testing. For example, I have a Creative
sound card which has a different interface from a Creative
CD-ROM drive which I also have. In that particular case, I
solved the problem by using a seperate card which has a
number of interfaces on it.
DOS or Linux, or:
Linux is great, and you may want to tackle the lerning
curve to take advantage of that power. BUT, DOS has a lot
of power in it's simplicity and ease of use. If you are
already proficient with it, and it does what you need,
then stick to it.
Stacker:
You'll probably get lots of opinions on this one. Some
people (like me) don't beleive in using on-the-fly
automatic compression and decompression of a whole drive.
When I want to save space, I archive files using a
stand-alone utility like PKZip or LHA. This is the most
reliable way to do it.
Hardware book:
I find Scott Mueller's "Upgrading and Repairing PCs"
(QUe books) both complete and easy to use. It is not
necesary to get the latest version. You can pick up an
older one for just a few dollars.
Cheers,
Ole Juul
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