All my content and ptohos
Pentium II 350MHz Tower
This is a typical Pentium II from late 1998. It has a
Taiwanese Atrend board, Pentium II processor and it primarily had 64MB
of RAM, later upgraded to 128MB. Graphics board is nVidia RiVA128,
AGP-based 4MB accelerator quite nice for late 1990s.
In its initial state it had Asus CD-ROM drive, later it was replaced by
Teac CD recorder.
These computers were purchased near 1998-1999 as home computers for
simple office works and gaming.
| Approx. year | late 1998 |
|
| Class | ATX | |
| CPU | Intel Pentium II | |
| Speed | 350MHz | |
| RAM | 128MB (2x64MB PC100 DIMM) |
|
| ROM | Award BIOS | |
| Mainboard | Atrend ATC6240 | |
| Graphics | nVidia RIVA 128 4MB AGP |
|
| Sound | Yamaha OPL3SAx ISA |
|
| Ports I/O | On-board, 2xCOM, LPT, PS/2, USB |
|
| Network | RTL8029 PCI 10MBit, RJ45/BNC |
|
| System expansion bus | 2x 16-bit ISA 5x PCI 1x AGP |
|
| Floppy/removable media drives | 1x 3.5" 1.44MB floppy disk drive | |
| Hard disks/ATA devices: |
Seagate ST36531A (6.3G,ATA) TEAC CD-W516EB CD-RW IDE disk drawer. |
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Peripherals in collection: |
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| Other boards:
|
None | |
| Casing | ATX tower | |
| Non-standard expansions: | None | |
| Operating system(s): | MS Windows 98 |
My unit has been purchased in late 1998, with 6.3GB hard
disk and 64MB of RAM, and I used it until early 2005. In 2000 I got a
HDD drawer for external hard disk (which was never installed). Few years
later I bought 40GB drive and CD writer, I also got a GeForce 2 video
board. It was used with Windows 98 until 2005, when I bought 2GHz
Athlon.
It is now restored as close to initial state as possible. I also have a
keyboard and mouse which was bought with it, it came with 15-inch Daewoo
CRT monitor, it haven't survived.
| Contents: | Starting, usage | Drivers |
Starting
The mainboard is a typical PC mainboard, boots to well known 4.51PG Award BIOS, there are only a few things to remember:
1. There are many ATC-6240 mainboards with different chipsets. The first 6240 had Intel 440BX chipset, and this mainboard came in at least 3 versions (1.1, 2, 3). There was also 6240V with VIA chipset and APM6240. They are not BIOS-compatible and flashing BIOS of one model to another makes mainboard inoperable. Manual for the first 6240 had never been published on the Internet, so I supply my scan. There was no driver supplied with it.
2. These mainboards, especially v1.1, had very poor RAM sockets and they may fail. More, it is an art to make it run with RAM you have as it's extremely picky about what DIMMs it can run. There is even a FAQ about it.
3. In version 1.1, ISA slot is moved a fraction of milimeter towards PCI slots. In most casings it causes no problems. In some cases you will get contact problems and instabilities when using e.g. sound cards, I recommend then to loosen screws keeping mainboard, re-seat boards and tighten the screws back.
4. Later units are prone to capacitor plague.
My mainboard had its BIOS updated to this version (118a
or 1.1 08) when I bought 40GB hard disk. Since then it suffered problems
when manually entering geometry for drives larger than 8GB, in fact only
autodetect works in these drives. You have been warned.
 |
ATC-6240 BIOS for V1.1 |
 |
ATC-6240 manual - DJVu format |
 |
ASUS CD-ROM drive drivers - from floppy, for DOS. |
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ASUS CD-ROM drive manual |
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Genius Mouse manual |
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Genius Mouse drivers - from floppy, for DOS |
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RTL8029 manual - for PCI network adapter. |
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nVidia RIVA128 manual |
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nVidia RiVA 128 drivers - for Win98 |
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Yamaha OPL3SAx manual |
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Yamaha OPL3SAx driver - CD contents, for Win98 |