At 06:01 AM 3/19/1998  Ron Bain wrote:
>
>    I plan to swap motherboards (maybe I should  build a new computer).  I
currently
>have an old 486 75 mHz.  Everything works fine, I just need more power and
more space
>on the hard disk drive.
>

Ron:

You should build a new system. You didn't list the parts
in your old 486 75 MHz PC, but I would guess nothing
original is worth keeping, except any 56K modem.

A basic system unit consists of:

     Case, motherboard, CPU, RAM, hard drive,
     floppy, CD-ROM, video card, sound card.

Without having to make much of a compromise, you
can get a Pentium 200MMX basic unit with brand parts for
$500, via wholesale or mail order discount. Sell the old
486 for whatever ($100 I should think is fair for the base
unit) and just go with the new PC.

The motherboard is the key.  Within my humble
experience, FIC is choice for econo-board.
About $100 for a decent model. Shuttle and
Biostar are equivalent. Next level costs about $40
more for comparable models: Asus, Abit, Gigabyte,
and AOpen. There are other fine boards but I haven't
had the pleasure to use them.

I have used many other boards, mediocre boards,
all with their charms (mainly price-performance)
but always compromising somewhere. But when it
comes down to the hassle/tweaking factor, the
$30 savings isn't worth it.  Is your time worth $15/hr?
Well, the "value" boards always take an extra couple
hours to fiddle with them to figure them out. Now,
that's not bad if you're making a production run
since once you figure out the idiosyncratic nonsense,
the next 20 are much faster.

But if you are building for yourself, spend a little
more for the quality. JMHO.

Regards,

John Chin

P.S., If you're on a budget, a $30 Intel 486DX4-100
CPU would make a big performance impact in your
existing system. Still not a Pentium, though.