New member with new question

[Billy Mayhem]

Hello to all and thanks to Scott for welcoming me! I have a question concerning the spare hard drive possibilities of my ancient Pentium 1. It's a Packard Bell Multimedia 601 Pentium 1 tower with original motherboard that I'm pretty sure was made by Packard Bell. It's got 233mhz power, 128 mgs RAM(I maxed it out) a 3 gig HD, two spare front loading bays for storage, running windows 95(still!) although I'd like to go to 98 se. My plan is; put a 100 or 250 mg. Zip in and a spare HD. How big a HD can I use with 95 and how big can I go with 98 se upgrade?
Cheers to everyone!
Billy

[Bill in SD, CA]

Welcome to TechIMO!!

In all honesty I think you would be throwing your money away upgrading this machine.

Especially when you can pick up a

Pentium III for $169.

Know this doesn't answer your question but the economics here don't make sense.

IMO

Bill

[Ryanoffski]

I agree with Bill. It's probably best to pick a barebone for a couple hundred bucks than throwing money into that machine. I can't see you getting much more life out of that machine before it's absolutely necessary to buy a new computer.

[captainjrl]

I believe that hard drive size or is more limited by your system BIOS rather than the OS.

I'm not an expert so I could be wrong.

[Billy Mayhem]

I think you guys would be surprised at how much mileage I still get out of this old thing. Works well for Internet dial-up, I can edit audio and do midi sequencing, good for word files, etc. I plan on upgrading eventually to an Apple G5 and enter the land of 64bit processing at some point in the future and then I'll probably leave my other 3 legacy computers alone but until then I'm not buying any Pentium 111's.
I just wanted to know how big a spare HD this thing could take. A computer store had a 2gig laying around for 15 bucks!

Hard drive limitations will be determined by your BIOS revision level. Considering the system has a socket 7 motherboard, your proposed 2GB hard drive should work fine.

Robert Richmond

[Bill in SD, CA]

Throw it in and "compress" it.

Should work.

At $7.50 @ gig today's 60 GB drive would only retail at $450.00 with a 160 GB drive coming in at a mere $1,200.00.

Bill

[elroy]

Seeing that you already have a 3gb drive, a 2gb will work fine. This is assuming that your board has dual IDE connections. I would upgrade the o/s to 98SE, it is much more stable then 95. Have fun!