Packard Bell and the CR-563-B
 

HI GanG !

( as usual, it's pretty dead around here. You could swing a Buick and not
hit anything.............. )

Don't know if you're interested but.......

Just for the hell of it, I was thinking about the Twin CD-ROM Packard Bell,
and figured I had better get going on checking out the FIRST drive to see if
it was any good. Then I figured that I had better check out the Sound Galaxy
Washington 16 sound card/combo thing with CD-ROM connector on it. 'cause it
it don't work, nothing else will.

Went digging through my voluminous files of old sound card and CD-ROM
drivers, and figured I would just toss some at it to see what happened.

First off, this old 75MHz PB has a 1.2G drive in it that someone upgraded
to Win98SE. I removed the IDE CD-ROM that they had installed previously.

I'll leave off my feeble fumbling with the CD-ROM drivers and stuff, 'cause
frankly, it's not that interesting.

Then I thought: What the Hell, let's see what Windows 98SE can find. I have
seen it work wonders with stuff that wasn't plug and play.

I WILL BE DAMNED.

Not only did it find the Sound Galaxy Washington 16 ( which I originally
thought was an Aztech 268. PB has this annoying thing about putting stickers
on the chips on sound cards, and announcing: WARRANTY VOID IF THIS STICKER
IS REMOVED. And you know I don't want that. ) sound card, it found the MKE
CD-ROM, the CD-ROM connector, game port thingies, and I think something
else.

Naturally, there was no CD-ROM drive to copy Win98 files from ( I personally
always installed Win9X from a folder on a different partition so that Win
never asked for the CD-ROM again, but alas, this person didn't do that ), so
I had to shut 'er down and hook up an IDE CD-ROM drive as a slave.

Hooked up an IDE CD-ROM drive, loaded drivers, copied Win98SE to a folder on
the C: drive, and shut it down again.

Started it up, let Win98 do it's thing again, and told it where to find the
files, and I'll be darned if it didn't install everything for me. Sound and
CD-ROM drive work perfect. Hecko, it even played a video from the Win98SE
CD-ROM just perfect.

People always complain about Microsoft, but I rarely have that much trouble,
and I guess I shouldn't have been that surprised. After thinking about this,
I have seen this happen before.

BUT, to be picky about this, I still have to go back and install the stuff
from scratch using Win 3.1 someday. ( Yeah, I know, that is picky, but ya
gotta do what ya gotta do to be "authentic. :-) I'll just use another HDD
and save this one. :-)

Bottom line, my CD-ROM drive and soundcard/combo thing work fine. Should be
interesting to see what Win98 does when another CD-ROM drive is connected.

Interestingly, the sound card has TWO audio connectors and cables for the
two CD-ROM drives. And they are marked 0 and 1. Pretty neato. Never saw that
before on such an old sound card.

As Forrest Gump would say: "One less thing.................."

bob


--
boBWatts®©
EartH
Watts Carburetion Service
Whizzbang Computers
Official collector of: transfat asian plastic junk trinkets !



--
boBWatts®©
EartH
Watts Carburetion Service
Whizzbang Computers