barry c wrote:

>  I recently recieved an old 486DX4/100 standard multimedia system with
> 32 Megs of ram. I was told that it had intermittent video problems, but
> that everything else was fine.I proceeded to check out the system for
> probs at that point. Right off the bat I found that the A drive wasn't
> being recognized.I changed out the drive and rebooted.<snip>
What  was what your OS? Win95, Win3.x ?   I had similar problems
with floppy-recognition when I "upgraded" (debatable point -that) to
Win95.
Everything had worked fine with Win3.1.  Traced it to an Award BIOS
problem
(it was documented on their website, but they would do *nothing* to fix
it).
After returning/exchanging the motherboard under warranty, the new
version
of the BIOS (it's *not* flash) DID recognize the floppies, but then the
modem became the problem child. I gave up. AMD233-MMX + Up-to-date
Motherboard
cost only $275, and a Cyrix200+ MMX can be gotten for less than $195. Go
for it.
Dave Ross
San Francisco