Easiest to start with the CPU Upgrade I suppose… Popped in a V30 8MHz chip and 8087-2 co-processor. Ran it through some basic benchmarks and it is a fair deal better than the vanilla 8086-2 (8MHz) CPU that was installed. I really didn’t expect to see that much of a difference.
Although I wouldn’t have been able to do this unless I had remembered about my Oak Technology ISA VGA card to give me display on my Viewsonic LCD screen. Later on, I tried a Trident GPU and it also worked, even though both cards were 16-bit ISA and not 8-bit. I guess whatever ran to the 16-bit must not have been as important.
The Oak card also has a built-in floppy drive and hard drive controller, thankfully it did not interrupt the onboard controller – it must have been disabled… Even though I cannot find any jumper settings for this particular Oak card. If anyone knows the jumper settings, please do let me know!
Also popped in a Sound Blaster 16 Vibra and it worked a charm too. Apparently, the 16-bit part of this card is all for the IDE / Creative / Panasonic connector for the CD-ROM interface. That’s fine. I don’t need a CD drive on my IBM PS/2 just yet! Worked straight out of the box too, didn’t need to Set Blaster or any of that. I should really try an ESS card in there to see if it works just as well.
I’m still waiting for the replacement hard drives to arrive for this machine. I’ll be lucky to have them in the next month at the rate the seller I am dealing with is progressing. Chances are I’ll end up lodging a PayPal dispute and getting a full refund since time is running out for me to do that and they haven’t even shipped it yet. They were completely silent until yesterday. At least they said they will get onto it tomorrow (which is yesterday). Ahhh timezones…