Late in 1995, one of my used-to-be friends got a
Cx486DX4-100 motherboard.
It had major problems...the CPU wouldn't operate any higher than 12MHz for
some odd reason. I thought I was getting an AMD DX4-100 until he told me
about this problem he had.
On December 25, 1995, I got a big upgrade to my computer...a 486DX4-100
motherboard with 8MB RAM, and an Orchid Kelvin 64 2MB VLB video card...
basically a faster Speedstar 64. CPU performance improved by 59%. I had
a fair share of problems with the DX4-100, unfortunately.
Problem #1: Floppy drives don't work properly with the CPU internal
cache enabled.
Problem #2: The video card would cause the sound card to make screeching
noises when changing to and from 640x480 in DOS. Also, the sound card would
make a noise every time the video card drew a new image in 640x480 in DOS.
I confirmed the problem by using my old Trident video card. The sound card
didn't make any strange noises with the old video card.
Problem #3: Sometimes the system wouldn't boot, and it would take a while to
get it running again, and sometimes just reseating the cards didn't help.
3 upgrades were installed while I had the DX4-100.
The first upgrade: A full tower case. Standing 2'8" tall, this huge case
has room for everything. It has 12 drive bays and a 250 watt power supply.
I had to connect everything myself. The first time I wired up the power
supply to the power switch, I did it wrong, and almost took the supply out.
I rewired it up correctly on the 2nd try and everything worked fine. I got
this case on March 2, 1996.
The second upgrade: An Iomega Ditto 800MB tape drive. It was a nice piece
of equipment while it lasted, until bad things happened. It kept despooling
tapes. I found out that a tape detect switch was misaligned, but I can't
fix it.
The third upgrade: Since I didn't have a CD-ROM drive, my mom got me an
Acer 6x CD-ROM drive.
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