johnl@ima.ISC.COM (John R. Levine) (08/02/87)
I am planning to upgrade my three year old IBM XT. (No flames, I got a good
deal on it at the time.) Currently I have a combo card, a 1200 baud internal
modem, and separate mono and CGA cards. I have to give my color screen back to
the people from whom I've been borrowing it, so while I'm at it I might as
well make some improvements. I'm not particularly interested in making it
faster; I have a PS/2 for that. All of the XT's long slots are full except for
the one from which I expect to pull the CGA card, so short controllers are
preferable. Anyway, I'm looking for suggestions for:
- 20MB or larger disk
- EGA and screen
- 3.5" disk drive, for data interchange with the PS/2
For the hard disk, I've heard of problems with Seagate 238 30MB disks on the
Adaptec controller; do other 30MB drives work hetter? For the EGA, I suppose I
could buy a Multisync screen, but it's expensive. Are there others that are OK
but cheaper? I don't particularly expect to plug the screen into anythng other
than the EGA. For the EGA card, they all seem to be made from one or two basic
chip sets. Is there anything to choose among them? And for the 3.5" drive,
I've seen ads that claim you can plug a 3.5" 720K disk drive into the XT's
controller and it'll work under DOS 3.3. Has anyone actually done so?
While I'm at it, does anybody other than IBM make a mouse that plugs into the
PS/2's mouse port? IBM's is chronically out of stock, and I need to use the
serial port for a modem.
All helpful advice appreciated. SMISITEI (send mail, I'll summarize if
there's enough interest. And, as always, TIA.
--
John R. Levine, Javelin Software Corp., Cambridge MA +1 617 494 1400
{ ihnp4 | decvax | cbosgd | harvard | yale }!ima!johnl, Levine@YALE.something
The Iran-Contra affair: None of this would have happened if Ronald Reagan
were still alive.hoctor@osiris.cso.uiuc.edu (08/04/87)
I get the impression that you don't use your XT for any heavy duty stuff. With that in mind, I would heartily recommend the Seagate ST225 20 Meg drive. The performance is marginal, but it is probably the least expensive drive available, and it is a real workhorse. I have had mine for over a year and I have NO bad sectors! I attribute this to parking the drive head before power down. If you have the ram, you can boost its performance with a disk cache also. Its nothing flashy, but it does everything it is supposed to do. Mike Bruno University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign