Computer Upgrades
Posted: Sep 7, 2002 @ 9:17pmOkay... I'm kind of in a mess. My parents have my 4 year old Pentium3 500MHz computer. Well their hard drive is just horrible, slow, runs in DOS Compatable mode, and recently just went kaputt. So we ran out and got a 60GB (as opposed to 12GB) ATA100 Western Digital hard drive, and while we were at it upgrade them to an optical mouse and got 256 more MB's of RAM (it was on sale, $15 for 128MBs... I got some for mine too 
). Well I get back here, fix up their computer all nice... and the BIOS won't detect the HardDrive. Apparently the highest the BIOS goes is UDMA/33, not even ATA/66, let alone 100, and the BIOS will only detect HD's up to 32GB's in size.
This computer works GREAT for them. It's quiet, fast enough for their interneting and word processing and geneology stuff. But now I can't get it up and running because the BIOS is so old. The BIOS revision is the latest one, v2.0. It's a Tyan Tsunami S1846 I think. Should I ... a) buy them a PCI ATA controller card or b) should I try to find a new motherboard, P4 is the cheapest stuff I can find, that supports SDRAM. c) Or should I just set the hard drive to DOS Compatable mode at 16MB/sec and only a tenth of the size? What's my best option?
). Well I get back here, fix up their computer all nice... and the BIOS won't detect the HardDrive. Apparently the highest the BIOS goes is UDMA/33, not even ATA/66, let alone 100, and the BIOS will only detect HD's up to 32GB's in size.
This computer works GREAT for them. It's quiet, fast enough for their interneting and word processing and geneology stuff. But now I can't get it up and running because the BIOS is so old. The BIOS revision is the latest one, v2.0. It's a Tyan Tsunami S1846 I think. Should I ... a) buy them a PCI ATA controller card or b) should I try to find a new motherboard, P4 is the cheapest stuff I can find, that supports SDRAM. c) Or should I just set the hard drive to DOS Compatable mode at 16MB/sec and only a tenth of the size? What's my best option?