Progress with the Acer Acros 575DB
Around 3 months ago, I ordered an Acer Acros 575DB off of ebay, it came to around $172 Canadian in total.
I ordered it because I once had a 486 machine which bit the dust.
It has a Pentium Socket 5 at 75mz, and 24mb of ram. The BIOS says 1990-1995, and the sticker on it says (c) 1995.
The origional CD-ROM drive said APR 1995, and the power supply's date code is 9451 (I'm guessing 1994), so this is an early pentium form just a few months before Windows 95, it seems. Which is perfect, as I want a mutlimedia PC from the time when Windows 3.1x was still widely used, and seeing as it seems to be from a few months before Windows 95, this fits the bill.
When I got it, I plugged it in, and nothing show up on screen, nothing at all.
I contacted the seller and I got the total price back - %100 refund.
I took it to my local repair shop, it took them a while to fix, but just yesterday, I got it back, working had to pay $82 for 1 hour of labour and taxes, etc but hey, in the end I only paid half of what I would've had to if it worked on first try.
Unfortunately, they had to change the CD-ROM drive, and they used this black one:
it's both obviously not period appropriate, as well as an eyesore. I was intitially a little worried about swapping it out for the drive from my 486 machine, because the configuration of the drives gave the technicians some issues. Eventually, I decided to just use the exact same cables, and jumper settings they set the black drive too, hoping a direct swap without having to change the BIOS configuration would work.
Luckily for me it did! Getting the drive cage out, installing the drive, and putting the drive cage back in was annoying, but now it looks much better.
It is 48x so not period appropriate still, but doesn't clash color wise at least.
Down the road I may buy myself a 4x drive, to match the sticker on the front.
I already have MS-DOS 6.22 installed, along with the oakcdrom.sys drivers.
Later today, it's time to install Windows 3.1, along with the Sound Blaster 16 and onboard VGA drivers.
I ordered it because I once had a 486 machine which bit the dust.
It has a Pentium Socket 5 at 75mz, and 24mb of ram. The BIOS says 1990-1995, and the sticker on it says (c) 1995.
The origional CD-ROM drive said APR 1995, and the power supply's date code is 9451 (I'm guessing 1994), so this is an early pentium form just a few months before Windows 95, it seems. Which is perfect, as I want a mutlimedia PC from the time when Windows 3.1x was still widely used, and seeing as it seems to be from a few months before Windows 95, this fits the bill.
When I got it, I plugged it in, and nothing show up on screen, nothing at all.
I contacted the seller and I got the total price back - %100 refund.
I took it to my local repair shop, it took them a while to fix, but just yesterday, I got it back, working had to pay $82 for 1 hour of labour and taxes, etc but hey, in the end I only paid half of what I would've had to if it worked on first try.
Unfortunately, they had to change the CD-ROM drive, and they used this black one:
it's both obviously not period appropriate, as well as an eyesore. I was intitially a little worried about swapping it out for the drive from my 486 machine, because the configuration of the drives gave the technicians some issues. Eventually, I decided to just use the exact same cables, and jumper settings they set the black drive too, hoping a direct swap without having to change the BIOS configuration would work.
Luckily for me it did! Getting the drive cage out, installing the drive, and putting the drive cage back in was annoying, but now it looks much better.
It is 48x so not period appropriate still, but doesn't clash color wise at least.
Down the road I may buy myself a 4x drive, to match the sticker on the front.
I already have MS-DOS 6.22 installed, along with the oakcdrom.sys drivers.
Later today, it's time to install Windows 3.1, along with the Sound Blaster 16 and onboard VGA drivers.
Comments
Neat!
Maybe you could put a 5.25 drive in the other slot!
If you have enough connectors anyway...