[WriteLog] Upgrading the Computer

[Rick Tyler]

I thought this might help anyone who might be in the same boat as I was.

Bought writelog this summer, 'bout the same time as I bought a Pegasus and
got back into ham radio after a few years of inactivity.  I've been running
on a 5x86-133 with 64M memory, which will work okay, but when I try to do
anything like rtty from within the program, the computer just goes:
"hahahahahahaha"
Since this is a dedicated ham radio computer, and since I'm running the
Writelog, N4PY Pegasus Control Program, Log Windows, and some other stuff, I
thought it might be nice to upgrade, but after reading many of the messages
on this list, I realized that upgrading can be frought with complications.
I'd already bought the Siig comm port expander and knew I needed something
with ISA slots to make everything work okay.  I thought about expanding
memory, but the old Simms that were used in my current motherboard are still
pricey, while the new PC133Dimms are pretty cheap, but no way could I use
them.
Then came the Tigerdirect catalog in the mail, and while thumbing through
it, I found you can still get new motherboards with both PCI and ISA slots!
So what I ended up doing is building a new computer using state of the art
(1998) technology.  Here's what I ordered from them:

VA503+ Motherboard (socket 7) 3 PCI slots 3 ISA slots 1 AGP Slot The PCI and
ISA slot share one slot, so it's really either 2 pci's and 3 isa's or 3
pci's and 2 isa's. It also comes equipped to handle the old 72 pin simms, or
the new 168 pin dimms. It will take up to a 550 mhz AMD cpu or many others.

AMD K6-2 450mhz
256M Pc133
Socket 7 PCU heat sink & fan

I used all my old stuff from the original computer.

The motherboard and the K6-2 combination was $92.00, the memory $29.00 and
the fan $4.00,
so for around $130.00 I have a new computer that just flies ( in
comparison )

The only tricky parts were setting the jumpers on the motherboard correctly
for the CPU and holding my breath while I fired it up. Everthing came up
okay, except windows couldn't find a mouse. I rummaged around in the box the
cpu came in and came up with a PS2 mouse port adapter, which also freed up
com1.  Then I noticed it was only running at 300MHZ, so I'd set one of the
jumpers wrong. A quick fix to move the jumper from x3 to x4.5 and that was
okay.  The biggest problem I came up with was that the Siig expander card
would sometimes work, sometimes, but never well.  It took me a while to find
out that I had to go into the BIOS and change the IRQs for all the ISA slots
to Legacy ISA instead of PCI control.  Once that was done, everything works
great.  I can run any ham radio program I've got, or all of them at the same
time  MMTTY, MMSTV, Digipan, . . . and advantage I've found with the
Pegasus, is that the programs that work with it read & write the info from a
file, and not the com port directly, so I can have Writelog open and
LogWindows open at the same time as the Pegasus software, which is the
program that addresses the radio directly through the com port.

So I've got this computer with 6 com ports:

com1 - pegasus
com2 - modem
com3- KPC3 TNC for DX cluster
com4- keying
com5- KAM (hey, I had one, might as well use up a port!)
com6- free

The old ISA Soundblaster works great with everything.

Obviously, if I wanted to use the KAM for both DX cluster and HF stuff, I
could free up another port.

Anyhow, it's working great . . . and cheap to boot!

73 de Rick, WQ8Q