🚀 go-pugleaf

We upgraded our Xt's to 286 12Mhz motherboards.  We originally got them from a 
place called Syntax Computers.  DO NOT get motherboards (Protek) from these
people!! 
We had nothing but hassles.  We ended up sending them back for a refund. 

DO get a DTK motherboard if you are looking to upgrade! We got these, put them 
in and plugged in the peripherals.  After going throught the setup program, 
everything worked great!! Honest! No nightmares with these babies!

The one XT had a RLL 32 Meg controller on it. (8 bit) We could use the drive 
with the data already on it as long as we didn't specify a drive in the setup.
If you DO specify the drive in the setup, you MIGHT have to re-format it.  
I had a 20meg Seagate MFM that I had to reformat.  We did the RLL just to be 
safe.  But you can backup your hardrive with your favorite program, format the
hard drive and restore it.  

The boards we got went for $174.  They came with 2 serial and 1 parallel on
the motherboard.  They fit into an XT size case and can take up to 36
41256 memory chips for 1 meg of ram.  They have 8 slots and selectable 
8/12 Mhz speeds.  The serial/parallel interupts are also user selectable by way
of jumpers.    

We had no problem running 8-bit cards on the 286's.  They are slower, but they
do work.  

SO:
Motherboard	$174
Memory		$36  (36 chips - 18 already in XT)
	      --------
		$210 total!

Note: Chips have to be at least 120ns chips to work in 286. I was lucky in that
      my XT had 120ns chips in it. 


                           xevious@cc2.bradley.edu