In June 1994, me and my brother saved enough money to
upgrade to a 486DLC-40
motherboard. It also involved giving up the 130MB HDD and the 386DX-40
motherboard. The motherboard cost $285. CPU performance was raised by about
50%, and the board had a math coprocessor on it. I made several upgrades to
the system when the 486DLC-40 was in it. My first do-it-yourself upgrade is
shown below.
The first upgrade: a Diamond Speedstar
64 1MB video card...now known
as the SpeedStar64 Graphics 2000. This card is faster in 24-bit color
than the Trident card was in 8-bit color. Custom refresh rates were possible.
I got the card on October 1, 1994.
Later, I got a 14,400 BPS modem. The first modem was bad, and I had to wait
a while for a replacement to come. The replacement worked good.
On December 25, 1994. I got a Philips CM-206 2x CD-ROM drive. Specs:
300KB/s transfer rate, 300ms access time. I had problems with the drive
tray and sent the whole drive in for repairs a few months later. It worked
for about a year after the repairs.
Also on December 25, 1994, I got an Irwin AccuTrak 120MB (compressed 2:1)
tape backup drive.
I got a 540MB Western Digital Caviar 2540 hard drive on March 2, 1995.
The drive was fast in its day. Specs: 4,500RPM, 12ms access time.
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