i have an ancient 386 packard bell computer and was wondering if i could replace the floppy drive B (5 1/2 floppy) with a cd rom drive??? also can i get a driver to have my monitor display 256 colors??? When i try to use the 256 colors in win 3.1 it tells me my monitor doesnt support it. I also get an invalid system config at boot up and it tells me it is decreasing memory but everything works find if i hit f1 and proceed to windows. Also if anyone has win 95 upgrade from 3.1 please email me a link or whatever you can. Please help

Ok, to put a CD drive in a 386, it would have to run off of it's own card or from (say) a soundblaster type soundcard. An ordinary IDE controller (such as a HDD controller) won't do it, you need EIDE (extended). There may be exceptions to this, but that's been my experience. If you have a decent VGA monitor, you can display 256 colours under Win 3.1 with the right video driver IF your video card has at least 500K vidram. When you start your machine, instead of hitting F1, look and see if it tells you how to access the setup screen (prob F2) - it seems like you need to check your memory settings. It's probably nothing major from the sounds of things - but you never know. I wouldn't bother trying to upgrade to Win 9x on THAT machine, it sounds seriously underpowered. For Win 95 you MUST have: 4+ Mb RAM (wouldn't bother unless I had 8+) 60 - 100 Mb Disk Space (just for Windows) Even on a 386 DX 40 MHz it'll run like sh*t

Some older computer have both an internal setup program accessed by hitting some function key as described above and another one that is set up from a floppy disk. On a couple of old DELL Pentiums that I have you have to configure all the adapter cards using the CONFIG floppy. The computer will work without the correct configuration but it helps the computer to keep your IRQs and DMAs straight. It is also possible that your 386 only functions from a floppy setup disk. You may have to do a little searching on the manufacturer's website.

Yeah, that setup disk was pretty common for 286's and (of course) those oddball IBM PS2's, and no doubt some other models. If that's the case, there are a few CMOS editors around that usu do the trick.

thanx for the info all, I can enter BIOS by hitting F2 and everything is set correctly. If you change the date and time to the correct date and time it usually works after you reboot a few times but it never holds the date or the time, and after you go into windows and check the date and time it has the wrong day with the date. Also i turned this computer back over to my mother after i fixed as much as possible and have it set up for her needs, but i would still love to know the answer to the problem above cuz every problem i have ran across, including recieving that thing with out no recognized hard disk on top of being formated, i have been able to fix it by reading these forums on this site. So once again thanx for all the help!!!!

On top of all that, it sounds like the computer's battery is just about worn out, which is why it keeps 'forgetting' things. Some batteries are easy to replace, some are soldered in... hope for the best.