After installing slink on my old 386, I salvaged a Pentium box from work that was to be sent to the trash. I have very little experience with Pentium motherboards since I've only owned a 486 and 386. The problem is the motherboard (and ASUS motherboard)was stripped of everything except a 1.44 floppy and the chip. Now I want to rebuild this machine so I don't have to run slink on the 386 (sloooooow...). My questions were:
1. It seems there's a VGA controller built into the motherboard with an accompanying serial cable to attach to a monitor. Does this mean I no longer need a video card like in older 486/386 models? 2. All memory was stripped (except for what I believe is a lithium CMOS battery). When I tried turning it on, there's no startup seen on my monitor. Am I correct in assuming I need some memory for the BIOS to load? Or is this related to Question 1 (ie I need to purchase a video card). 3. Looking at the ports, I noticed some 8 bit slots (no Vesa Local Bus slots though) and some shorter ports I did not recognize. Are these PCI ports? 4. Additionally, there appears to a Com Port controller built into the motherboard (like the Video question above). Is this also a trend to integrate serial card controllers into the motherboard now? I realize these are pretty amateur questions but it's been a while since I've worked with newer hardware (lack of cashflow and time) but it would be really nice to upgrade to a Pentium machine from the 386. Thanks in advance, Scott Au [EMAIL PROTECTED]
