Olivetti PCS Tinsl/II P75 upgrade to P90?
Andrew Oakley
Hi, I've been given an aging Olivetti PCS TINSL/II P75 PC with an Intel
Pentium 75mhz (socket 7). It runs Windows 95 just fine. I'm trying to
beef it up for my dad.
I'd like to upgrade it to a P90 and have discovered that by changing
the jumpers J9 and J10 I can switch between 75, 90 and 100mhz.
According to the remains of a somewhat useless photocopied manual this
is 1.5x50mhz, 1.5x60mhz and 1.5x66mhz respectively.
However, when I plug in my spare (known to be working) P90 chip and
boot up, whilst it correctly displays the clock speed as 90, it doesn't
get very far into booting Windows95 before it locks up (problems
include: cloud screen freezes, or, reports "division by zero" error).
I suspect that there may be either a) another jumper I need to fiddle
with or b) a BIOS upgrade required.
Can anyone help? Thanks very much in advace.
Olivetti recently sold their PC arm and there is little if any info on
their website - although URLS much appreciated if you can find some!
Model details again:
Olivetti PCS TINSL/II P75/n
AMI Bios 1994
Number on boot up: Y-562321W-07-51451
Number tattooed on rear of unit: 086015*BA2199*
For the purpose of DejaNews here are some other bits of info I have
worked out about this beast:
- The power supply and hard/floppy disk drive rack are on a hinge.
Slide the horizontal bolt above the floppy into the open position and
push the vertical slider next to the power supply, then swing the rack
up and out to the side. You can then free the rack from the PSU slider
and gently lift the entire rack out of the unit at 45 degrees. Makes
installing new drives a total doddle!
- There is space for a HDD under the PSU as well as under the floppy
drive.
- Press SPACE to get into the BIOS, then use TAB and cursor keys, or
the mouse, to move about. You must press SPACE very early on in the
boot up process- often before your monitor has even warmed up!
- To fit an IDE CD-ROM, set it as slave on the primary IDE then set the
BIOS settings for the Primary Slave as SCSI. Yup, even though the CD-
ROM is IDE you need to set the BIOS as Primary Slave SCSI! Something to
do with Adaptec compatibility I'll be bound.
- The Advanced HDD settings in the BIOS include a HDD auto-detect
feature which correctly assigns cylinders, heads etc. for hard drives.
It is clueless when it comes to CD-ROMs however.
--
Andrew Oakley <andrew@Spam_Me_Not_oakley.net>
Cotswolds, UK www.andrew.oakley.net
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
Andrew Oakley
Andrew Oakley <cimm...@my-deja.com> wrote:
> Hi, I've been given an aging Olivetti PCS TINSL/II P75 PC with an
> I'd like to upgrade it to a P90 and have discovered that by changing
> the jumpers J9 and J10 I can switch between 75, 90 and 100mhz.
> However, when I plug in my spare (known to be working) P90 chip and
> boot up, whilst it correctly displays the clock speed as 90, it
> doesn't get very far into booting Windows95 before it locks up
BIOS upgrade to v1.13 fixed this. Runs fine at 90mhz or 100mhz (found
P100 chip lying around). Wierd thing is, only works when jumpers are
set to 5v despite CPU being rated only for 3.5v. Have stress tested
machine for 6 hours running Quake demos, and CPU remained stone cold
(although I did install a CPU fan). Suspect 3.5/5v jumper switch is
ignored by new version of BIOS.
BIOS upgrade download, plus video/sound drivers all at:
http://www.olecomp.com/ihdesk/support/dwpcspxx.htm
(replying to myself, a bit mad I know, but someone using dejanews will
thank me one day... :-)