Pentium 200

                 An article by Bill Commons

I have been playing a lot of RPGs during the past six months and
I have needed to refer to the solution in all of them. It may be
coincidence or that my choice of games are shared but most of
these solutions have been sent in by Alex van Kaam. This is great
because when I wander along the corridors and forests I feel that
I am following in his footsteps, except he must have travelled
over them many times to be able to provide the maps and answers to
the puzzles. I feel that if I cannot solve a problem in two or
three hours then I will never find it.

This made me a sort of fan of his and when I read that he had
built his own computer I thought I would like to do that as well.
I always felt that I was missing something though, so I thought
how can I get among the leaders? My answer was to attempt to
build the very latest computer using the top rated components.

I then read lots of magazine articles and of course Alex's hints
in SynTax and his suggestions via email on the Net.

My system was decided to be the following -
Supermicro P55T2S motherboard fitted with a Pentium 200MHz CPU.
2.1g Seagate hard drive
8 speed Toshiba CD Drive
32meg ram
Soundblaster AWE board
Matrox millennium 4meg graphics card
Sony 17" SF2 multiscan monitor
Yamaha 10 watt speaker system plus subwoofer speaker.

Also some other goodies like Cherry click keyboard, Zip drive,
28.8 ext. modem, tower case and all the various bits needed to
bolt it together.

This was back in May and I estimated that it would cost 3000
pounds approximately and I could afford to spend five hundred
pounds a month until it was finished.

I rang up a mail order company and asked about the Pentium chip
and they said that it would be available in June. I searched and
found a supplier of a tower case on castors because I thought that
I could wheel it about, my first big mistake! The case with its
300 watt power supply in the top and the small area of the base
was really top heavy and it was not long before I sent it flying,
thankfully this was before I fitted the drives which I think would
not like being dropped.  Off came the castors and I made some feet
from flat galvanised steel which when fitted lowered the height by
two inches with the added bonus of being able to slide it under my
computer bench and take up less room.

I then got the motherboard and it was huge, it fitted into the
case but the ram banks were under the 3.5 bays and I could not get
my fingers into the gap to remove or add memory chips. Out came
the hacksaw again and I removed part of the drive bay, the case
was really sturdy though and there was still four 3.5 slots left.


As I bought the other bits I was able to try them out on my 486
computer and was I glad that I could. I was surprised at the
amount of defective stuff that I received. If I had all the
problems at the end I would have gone round the twist.  Problem
number one was when unwrapping a modem in a sealed manufacturer's
box saying the contents was a 28.8 and pulling out a 14.4 modem.
I returned this and ordered a new serial cable only to be sent the
wrong one back. I must say that all the mail order companies
exchanged the goods but the return postage was down to me.

My next headache was the speakers, the first delivery sent a
faulty right hand speaker and I had to send the complete set back.
On getting the replacement the left hand speaker wouldn't work so
an item costing 39 pounds cost, including the original postage, 30
pounds to send back and forth.

All this time I had been enquiring as to when the CPU would be in.
June rolled into July, August and a definite promise on the 29th
August for the first of September. I ordered it and waited for a
week and then rang back, "sorry" was the reply "we will not be
getting them until the end of October" I tried several other
suppliers but all gave the same story. Oh well I thought, I will
order my monitor. After I had telephoned this through to another
dealer I had an awful thought, I rang the firm with the chip order
and said that I hoped that they had not taken the money for the
order, of course they had, and I panicked in case I did not have
enough money in the bank.  They promised a refund and I checked
and I did have sufficient funds anyway. This was just as well as
two days later they rang to say that they had them after all.

This was followed by a severe case of self doubt, I remember
fitting ROM chips in the old computers and often got the pins bent
and had to straighten them with pliers, supposing I bent and
ruined a œ500 chip?.

When I tried to fit it, I placed it on top of the ZIF socket and
took a deep breath and it suddenly dropped in, now I know what
they mean by zero insertion force. My problems were not over
however as I was told that Intel had designed the new chip without
the ceramic cover and this made it much thinner, every time I
tried to fit the cooling fan it popped off. I had visions of the
fan zooming around inside the case destroying everything in its
path. After a bit of bending I managed to get the legs to clip
over but it took two seconds to fit the chip and all afternoon to
fit the fan.

While this was happening I realised that the monitor had not come,
I waited a week and rang the supplier, this was on Friday morning
and I was told that they would ring back, I can't hear my doorbell
from my bedroom so when I am expecting a delivery I sleep on my
couch in the lounge. I had spent a week doing this and had sat in
every day in case it was delivered later in the day, usually
though the post is early in the morning. I had read some horrific
stories about this monitor on the many bulletin boards on the
Internet, they said that it had two wires across the screen to
hold the picture in place and if shaken it would cause the screen
to vibrate. One person in America had returned thirteen Trinitron
screen monitors and remembering the speaker fiasco I was starting
my worries again. I had not received a telephone message and on
Monday morning I rang them again. I was told that it had been
dispatched the previous Monday. Two days later I rang again and
was told this time that they were out of stock. They said that
they would get on to their suppliers and would send one within two
days.

The next morning it arrived straight from the manufacturers, I
opened the box and the first thing I saw was a power cable with
the warning notice on it "not to be used in the UK".  I got
straight on the telephone, and after a week of backache due to
sleeping downstairs I was not in a very good temper!  They
promised to put a UK cable in the post straight away. I went back
to the box and under some packing was a power cord with our
thirteen amp plug on it. Oops. I telephoned back and they said
that they had sent me a cable, I said that I felt a fool and
apologised and had found the cable in the box, they laughed and
said would I send it back if they could not cancel the dispatch.
I had already tested the computer with my old monitor and the
relief and pleasure I felt when it started up straight away was
worth all the misgivings and hassle that I had felt during the
last few months.

One thing marred this when I plugged in the new 17 inch monitor,
the icons were tiny in the top left corner and I would need a
magnifying glass to see them yet alone read them, It was set at
1024x768 and I had to go back to 640x480 before I could make them
out. Also the screen was all blurred but everyone else said it was
crystal clear. I have ruined my eyesight using computers since
1982 or it may be old age, but I could not figure out this
problem. Suddenly it dawned on me, because the screen was bigger,
I was sitting much further back, as soon as I moved my chair
closer I was in business.  When I set up the graphics card it made
the desktop twice as big as the screen and it reminded of the ST
when you had to scroll up and down and side to side to find the
program icon.  I read in the manual that I had an almost unlimited
choice of colours and icon sizes for my desktop display but as yet
I can't get to grips with the amount of options that I have with
the graphics and the soundcard.

The price of memory modules have almost halved since I bought
mine, but on the other hand the price of the Pentium chip dropped
by a hundred pounds since I first priced it. I could have probably
had it made up by a dealer much cheaper but then I would have lost
the experience and the satisfaction of seeing the screen light up.
The total cost so far without delivery charges is 2588 pounds.

The speakers are a great disappointment, the subwoofer shakes the
whole house so I have got it turned right down, the other two are
called active speakers and sometimes they are blasting out and
other times I can hardly hear them, this is without touching the
volume control. My other computer is connected up to my Hi-Fi and
the output is much better.  I find that the system is not all that
different to my old set up, I did notice that when playing
Freecell that the cards move faster than my eyes can follow, and
have been told that the old DOS games will have to be run under a
program called Moslo to slow the computer down.

When I told my daughter about my not hearing the doorbell she said
that she couldn't understand why I did not buy a wireless door
bell, and then I could carry the bell out into the garden or

upstairs with me. I had not known of these, and after fitting one
I wished that she had told me about them six months earlier.

One curious thing that I have noticed is the 8 speed cd rom drive
will not read my new win95 rom disk very well. I had to get a new
disk after I scratched the old one by my cleaning methods, but
that is another story. I was getting messages, on the new rom
disk, that cab file so and so would not expand and may be
corrupted. When I put the old scratched cd rom in it read it quite
happily.

My future plans are to add a television and teletext card, an
internal zip drive, but I have only seen these on the Net in
America, and a CD writer.





                              - o -