lord@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Dave Lord) (05/04/90)
I am looking at buying a noname 386 PC and am wondering if there are things I should watch out for. It will have at least 2 meg of memory, 67 - 80 meg of disk and VGA color. I want to run both Dos and Unix. Are there any component brands that I should insist on or avoid?
shim@zip.eecs.umich.edu (Sam Shim) (05/04/90)
In article <2851@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM> lord@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Dave Lord) writes: > > I am looking at buying a noname 386 PC and am wondering if there are > things I should watch out for. It will have at least 2 meg of memory, > 67 - 80 meg of disk and VGA color. I want to run both Dos and Unix. > > Are there any component brands that I should insist on or avoid? For a motherboard, I recommend AMI or the Micronics motherboards. They are very well made motherboards. I 've heard some bad comments about the Mylex motherboards (such as being sensitive to heat) a while back, so you might want to avoid them. There are also many no-name clone motherboards, most of good quality. In general, most good no-name motherboards uses the Chips and Technologies chipset. AMI makes the most trouble free 386 BIOS, so I would look for a motherboard with the AMI BIOS. The Award and Phoenix BIOS have been a little troublesome, but not to a great extent. I recommend getting a large hard drive with your computer. A full blown UNIX system in one partition and DOS in another partition could easily take up over 100 Megs of hard disk space. I would buy a 160 Meg hard drive. Good ones are the Seagate Imprimis drives, Micropolis drives, the Conner drives, and the Microscience drives. You should get a hard drive that uses either the ESDI or the SCSI interface simply because they are faster. A drive running the ST-506/412 interface has a max data transfer rate of 500-750 kb/sec. A good ESDI or SCSI drive can get 1,000 kb/sec. Since you are getting a 386, the slowest part of the computer system is the hard drive, so why not get the hard drive that can transfer data to the CPU the fastest? Good controller manufacturers are DTC, Adaptec, and Western Digital. Most VGA cards are well made. I personally prefer the ATI VGA Wonder and the Paradise VGA cards. And I would mate them with the best 14" multi-syncing monitor out on the market, the NEC 3D monitor. Vivid colors, and great control over you screen. And one last thing. I recommend 8 to 12 Megs of RAM, or at least 4 Megs. Many versions of UNIX require 4 Megs of RAM. And for DOS, I run Desqview 386 to use the extra memory to multitask and I use a 1 Meg Super PC-Kwik disk cache to speed up my disk performance. Hope this helps! Sam Shim EECS Departmental Computing Organization University of Michigan "I'm a computer consultant. My job is to deal with User IQ errors!" - me
jca@pnet01.cts.com (John C. Archambeau) (05/04/90)
lord@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Dave Lord) writes: > > I am looking at buying a noname 386 PC and am wondering if there are > things I should watch out for. It will have at least 2 meg of memory, > 67 - 80 meg of disk and VGA color. I want to run both Dos and Unix. > > Are there any component brands that I should insist on or avoid? Avoid DTK motherboards. They have a well documented problem with going in and out of protected mode. So well documented, that there's a patch to make Novell Netware run with a DTK motherboard. Deals with their proprietary cache controller to my understanding. // JCA /* **--------------------------------------------------------------------------* ** Flames : /dev/null | Xenix is the ONLY thing ** ARPANET : crash!pnet01!jca@nosc.mil | Microsoft did right. ** INTERNET: jca@pnet01.cts.com ** UUCP : {nosc ucsd hplabs!hd-sdd}!crash!pnet01!jca **--------------------------------------------------------------------------* */