Hey everyone,
Well I thought the internet had all the information about everything you could ever want to know, but I think I've been proved wrong. I have an old Packard Bell Multimedia L197 that I haven't touched in a very very long time. I also don't have the money I need to create the computer I want right now. Needless to say, I'm very board and have started a new project of messing around with this really old computer. The problem is, I cant seem to find anything out about its mobo. If anyone knows anything, FSB, max ram(which I seem to be getting conflicting info, some places say 64mb, others 128mb), newest bios, list of accepted cpus, please let me know. I need to work on something or else I'm gonna go crazy.
Thanks.

Time to quote my computer guru:

"Do note ever bring another @#$%^&* Packard Bell piece of @#$% into my house ever again! That was many years ago and perhaps the 2nd best advice I ever recieved (reading betwen the lines).

PB made perhaps the worst PCs ever, opting for just enough resources to get by. There is little or no technical documentation for PB because their products were just so bad. Stop driving yourself crazy and find a better project.

memoryX says 128mb max

I know its a peice of $@&#! Thats the point of the project, I want to see if I can actually make it an "ok" computer, compared to what it was, the worst thing I have ever spent money on. Its either this or a Gateway2000 4DX2-66V which runs windows 311...

Ah yes, I did this experiment. I stumbled across my old Win 3.11 box a couple of years ago. I decided to see if it could handle Win2K. A quick trip to the Goodwill Computer Store and I came home witn a NIC and 128MB of some RAM that was so old, they gave it to me for free. The RAM worked so I was all set. I had a PI 100 MHz proc, a 1.5 gig narrow SCSI HD, a CD, a floppy, an ISA NIC, an ISA sound card, and a PCI video card. It's been a while since I did this so I don't remember everything about all the hardware. Well anyway, it was a long slow OS install but the thang worked, sound and all. It was creeping slow but fairly stable.

Cool.
Yeah, this PB has a pentium 1 150mhz cpu and 32mb ram, I'm thinking about buying a 233mhz cpu for it, I see them on ebay for less then 10 buck, but I dont know if this mobo can work with the MMX or not, which is one of the reasons I was looking for the specs...
I think I'm also going to double the ram, its the 72 pin type, really cheep. Then, I wanted to flash to the newest bios I could find(but I cant find ANY) and see if I could overclock at all, the P1 was passively cooled in this computer, but I'm going to add a fan and heatsink I have just sitting around, I really wanna see how far I can push it before it blows up on me. :evil: