A friend of mine decided to upgrade his computer. It started with a new motherboard and hard drive. He got an adaptor for his 30-pin RAM to allow him to plug it into the new 72-pin slots. He also bought additional RAM. The new motherboard wouldn't fit into the old case so he had to get one of these as well. The video card wasn't working with his new motherboard so he bought a new one. This still didn't work and he suspected it might be his old monitor causing the problem so off to the store he went to buy a new monitor. By this stage he figured that he had bought almost all the components he needed for a new computer and bought a new keyboard, mouse and floppy disk drive just to complete it.
Upgrades are fun and can be good if you haven't got the money now to buy a complete system. The problem is they don't always work and you might find yourself having to bear additional expense obtaining further components. Also computer shop people are good at providing solutions to your problem by selling you things. They are not attempting to rip you off, but these are simply the solutions they understand.
Your main problem is the VLB graphics card. There are two standards of local bus expansion slots: VLB and PCI. In the days before the Pentium, VLB was the more popular standard. Almost every 486 computer with a local bus will use VLB. When the Pentiums came out they were all PCI. Some of the later 486s were PCI and for people with these they should be able to use their old video card in a new motherboard. Because of the different standards you cannot use your VLB card in a PCI motherboard and I have never seen a VLB Pentium motherboard.
- Roy Chambers