JIM HOLSONBACK wrote in a message to ROY J. TELLASON:

 JH> Hello, Roy.

 JH> About your mainboard, which is most likely a PCChips M571 -  I'm
 JH> surprised you still seem to be "fishing for help" here, and seem
 JH> unable to ID the mainboard on your own.

Actually,  once I saw that mention of "M571" I googled on that, 
and the first hit took me to a page with a *lot* of info on that board. 
First thing I see when it comes up is a picture of the board...

I've saved some of those pages,  and unfortunately somebody somewhere along
the way decided to use ms word (!) to do the pages with,  so the coding is
absolutely awful,  but at least the info I was looking for is there.

 JH> Mystery Mainboard ID, In general - - .

 JH> One way -  write down the "BIOS String" which appears at bottom of
 JH> the screen during POST.  Look up mfgr and likely find more at
 JH> wimsbios.com.

That one's new to me.

 JH> Another way - run program CTBIOS.EXE  which I know you have there.
 JH> It will run off of a DOS/Win9x hard drive, but if you're messing
 JH> around with Linux on that HDD,  might be best to put the program on
 JH> a DOS-based boot diskette.

Yeah,  as I said a little bit ago I really need to get that on a bootable
floppy.  But then I spend relatively little time doing this stuff these
days and much more time actually *using* the stuff once I get it going, 
so...

 JH> Hint, hint -  if you have a "genuine" PcChips M571 board, that BIOS
 JH> string, which will appear at bottom of screen during POST, and will
 JH> be reported back by CTBIOS.EXE,  there will be the numbers "571"
 JH> near the end of the "string".

Ok,  I'll try and remember that if I reboot it any time soon,  though
that's rather unlikely at this point in time.  With that box once I get it
up it stays up,  for the most part.

 RJT> Any comments from all of you guys with regard to chipsets,  board
 RJT> makers,  etc. would be of some interest.

 JH> I'm not a fan of "cheap" mainboards - - I have seen too many of 
 JH> them die premature deaths (i.e. within a year or two).

I'm not real clear on which ones would fit that category or not.

 JH> More recently than the vintage you seem to be "bottom fishing" 
 JH> for, even name-brand boards seem to be dying too early -  probably
 JH> associated with that "capacitor" problem" which has
been discussed
 JH> here.

Yes.

 JH> Somehow, some way, sooner or later, I think you will be glad when
 JH> you finally make a break from what seemed good 6 or 8 years ago,
 JH> and move beyond AT cases and buying used BabyAT form factor
 JH> mainboards with chipsets which will only support 200Mhz level
 JH> P54C/P55C pentium class processors.

Actually as sold the board would support up to a 233 .  And from
what my research has told me,  it seems that if I got my hands on a K6-3
(not -2),  I could go a whole *lot* further,  perhaps as far as 500MHz.  It
also appears that this board will handle considerably more memory than the
64M that the other boards I was messing with would deal with,  though I
haven't gotten as far as digesting that part of the info yet.

I also may have a lead on some local stuff that won't cost me anything at
all, I've gotta see how that turns out.  And if that's the case,  you sure
can't beat that price.

I know it'd probably be a good thing to be moving up to some newer stuff, 
but from what I hear the newer stuff isn't always that much better,  or
that much more reliable,  as it turns out.  I keep hearing about problems
with ATX power supplies seemingly blowing up so much easier (and sooner!)
than the older AT supplies,  and there's that cap problem you mention,  I
remember reading about it here and elsewhere,  but don't recall particular
time frames with regard to that.  I'm going to have to research it a bit
and see what I can find out,  as the effects of that one are pretty
far-reaching as I understand it.  And it seems to me at this point that if
I can get a rough idea of what time frame that problem happened in I'd be
better off staying away from it altogether...

In the meantime I have a nicely functioning firewall/router built around a
386dx40,  and the bbs keeps chugging away on a 486.  

---