Now as things go this system happens to be about the most up to date PentiumMMX Board that Intel produced for the Socket7 line and so we very much doubt a Bios update would have been needed anyway. The system itself was already Y2K compliant as well, or so previous testes would have us believe. Either way a hasty removal of the OLD CPU was no problem and now came to installing the new one. We lined up the pins and moved the CPU down into position; it was now that the first problem arose. The universal problem with motherboards is that people only make them to support specific hardware and so sometimes you get space problems. In this case a group of batteries and transistors lay in the way of pressing the bulky kit hard into the slot. Thankfully we were able to move these aside just enough for the processor and it's mount to sneak into position and get locked in.

Next came the Fan and without even looking inside the case we knew there were going to be a few moments of annoyance ahead considering how tall the completed Mount+CPU+Fan was going to be. It took several minutes of hard fiddling to position it right and get the metal clamps firmly clasped in, however it's always been this way with fans so there was nothing wrong with it. Since the Voltage was set correctly for such a CPU anyway and a 75Mhz Bus was fairly standard, we decided to stick with those settings and just boot the system. It went well, although the CPU came out as a K6-233 on the start-up screen. This makes no difference to the CPU really and the diagnostic knew exactly what it was, citing the changes before and after installation:

Before: Integer-353,535 Multimedia-600,050

After: Integer-650,500 Multimedia-1,000,000

I can't be 100% sure of those figures as I forgot to note them down, but those are in the right margin. Next we loaded up Windows98SE to see just what changes we would notice, remember this is a practical test in a real world situation so benchmarks show very little. It wasn't long before problems occurred, the Kernel32.dll would crash, and sometimes Explorer would crash and then other times various programs simply refused to load and would crash. Since these problems didn't exist before, it was our conclusion that this was related to the bus speed not being the 66Mhz recommended for the CPU. Off went the system and our eyes glanced slowly back to the dusty insides of the motherboard, there we found a group of jumpers relating to bus speeds. When all else fails, follow the instructions and that's what we did, setting it to 66Mhz. From there on everything was fine.

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