upgrading a Packard Bell

[Fingers]

My sisters friend needs a little more power than she has now and wants to upgrade her PackardBell Platinum Pentium 2240. I think it ran OK with Win95, but since she upgraded it to Win98, her 1.93GB hard drive is about maxed out.

1st, Is anyone familiar enough with old PB's to know for sure if there is room for a 2nd HD

2nd, is there anything proprietary about PB's that will prevent me from tossing in a new HD.

3rd, is the memory proprietary, or will any 72-pin EDO SIMM work?

Thanks in advance

[CubKid]

Hmm, 2nd harddrive shouldnt be a problem unless its a desktop case, then you might not have enough room for one. Id recommend buying a new one, or a used one thats a little bit bigger. The PB's Mobo shouldnt have a problem with a 2nd harddrive, just make sure your IDE cable has a place for another harddrive. As for the ram, Im not totally sure about that. Depends on the CPU/board.

[Fingers]

Thanks CubKid, She described it as a tower, so I assume that's what it is.

I'm pretty sure this thing will have a hard drive size limitation in the Bios, hopefully it's 8.4GB and not 2.1... I hate EZ-Drive

[rick31]

have you tried Rays Packard Bell site yet it was a good resource forPBs
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconVall...774/index.html
good luck

[Pshawn5]

umm i had a pb 166 mhz and i was able to get a 8.4gb in there... if it's 2.1 just partition the drive

[Fingers]

Well, maybe I'll wait til I get my hands on it and can run the Western Digital bios diagnostics. I have a 20GB that I could split in half and put in there, but there's also a computer show this weekend and I'm sure I can grab a small hdd pretty cheap.

Rick, no I hadn't tried it, but it does look like a good source for PB info. I didn't find anything specific on a quick once-over, but I'll dig a little deeper.

Thanks guys

[Tomteriffic]

Fingers, my one and only PB came out just before that one, and it had a 2.1 gig BIOS limitation on it. There was room for a second HD in there and I put one in, no problem, and used Partition Magic to chop it up. My board wasn't persnickety whether you used FPM or EDO, but it all had to be the same type.

My guess is that there's going to be one slanted SIMM slot in there that's a certifiable booger to get the memory in and out of. The trick is to take memory out of that one out first and put it in last.

Have fun

[kenyg]

I've got an old PB - Ram was an issue with it - I got 64mb in it, and thats all its ever gonna have. Big problem I had was only two PCI slots - so killing the onboard video (whopping 2mb) took one slot, and a nic card took the other. I was able to put a 13.6mb maxtor in it with no problem - and got one of those k62 base evergreen cpu's in without a problem. - the board wouldn't do AMDk6 voltage otherwise.

The board in it is the PB810 - also known as a FM530 (i think).

it pretty much serves as an IM machine for the kids and a UD cow. It runs very stable with W98.

- edit - I did have a 2nd HD in it for a while, there was room and it ran fine. Also as I remember, it would take just about any 32mb (66mhz) stick of ram, the problem was trying to put anything larger in. People would put 64mb sticks in and only see 8. Had to do with timing or something - so I've got 2 sticks of 32mb 66 in.


Ken

Maxtor HDDs come with the EZ-Bios utility to overcome the GB limitation. I used PNY Ram in my old, now dead PB. 72 MB Max with the two slots and 8mb on-board.

[CubKid]

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http://www.geocities.com/SiliconVall...774/index.html

rofl, got that when I went to the Geocities pb site. *note to self, STOP clicking links.. *