Hi,
I'm posting this on both the Win 3.x and Win 9x forums because it is a hardware problem (I think) so it doesn't really fit into these categories. But, I intend on loading Win 95 on the machine if it is possible.
I have a Digital Starion 300i machine, pentium 75 MHz (original motherboard, but all of the other guts have been changed out over the years). It currently has a Western Digital 850 MB HDD, 24 MB RAM, no OS as of yet...
The problem I am having is that the machine is very slow, uncharacteristically so. I have multiple machines in a school lab, ranging from 486 SX 25 to P75's and this machine is by far the slowest when it comes to basic functions such as booting from a floppy, running installer files, etc. For example, I inserted the Western Digital hdd utility to reformat the drive and set up the machine - it took MINUTES for the logo splash screen from Western digital to even come up, let alone use the utility. Then when that is finally through, running the Win 95 setup, it takes a very long time to start the installation wizard (right after it scandisk's), in fact so long that I've given up on it. I've changed interface cables, even the hard drive to other ones, but nothing seems to work. Is there a motherboard problem? Does my bios need updating (how does one do that, if it is even possible...)? I'm at a real loss here. Any help would be much appreciated. Please email me if possible any suggestions, but a post here would also be ok...

Thanks in advance!
kmg

A 75mhz pentium w/24mb of ram should perform rather well. Eventhough, the motherboard is the only essensial original hardware in your case. It sounds like a motherboard problem. Was the motherboard taken out of the case?
It could be that your board was demagnetized with other hardware surrounding it.

motherboard was never removed... in transit (carrying between the school I teach at and home) something may have happened??? thanks for the input so far!

Hi kmg:
These are things that might effect your PC.
First see if you have a seperate control card for your hard drive, floppy drive, & ports. If so then that might be the problem, but if control cables go to motherboard, then it could be bad, or a component on the board. Your bios should only contain information needed to run drives, clock, & memory, so I don't think that's the problem. When your PC boots when turned on, does it look normal running the memory check, system information screen before it starts floppy a:/. If this seams to work right, then I would guess that the problem is with the control board which handles the sending & receiving of data to storage devices. One last thing you could try is to remove one at a time the cards to motherboard to clean contacts, also try the power supply connection to motherboard, & even memory chips. Maybe some bad connections between these conections, but be carefull & make sure that you ground yourself to remove any static charge you might have. Static can destroy some electronic conconents on boards, & don't stand on carpet which will create static charges.

Good luck.
Z

Are there any jumpers on the Mother Board to alter clock speeds? Could a jumper be missing?

Thanks for the help so far people... Unfortunately I have trried the things mentioned here to no avail. The jumpers are ok for clock speed, there's no separate card for the hdd... I'll keep at it though.