Mark, most PCI motherboards have a few ISA slots. The trick is to make sure it has enough slots to take all your ISA cards. The modern BIOS on the motherboard will handle your disk without the BIOS-tricking software from OnTrack, but the speed difference will not be noticeable. A new motherboard is very likely to include an integrated IDE disk controller, as well as parallel and serial ports. That means you won't need your old disk controller and I/O cards, so you'll only need two ISA slots in the new system, for your video and sound cards. You will find that a PCI-based video card is much faster than the ISA cards, so you might want to upgrade in the future to a new video graphics card.
You will have trouble using the old SIMMs unless your existing motherboard uses 72-pin rather than the older 30-pin SIMMs. Nearly all the new motherboards on the market use the newer 72-pin SIMMs. You can buy an adaptor board that lets you plug old 30-pin SIMMs into it, then plug the adaptor into a 72-pin slot. However, memory is cheap at the moment, and now is a good time to buy 16Mb for your new system. There is a strong feeling around that the 30- to 72-pin adaptor boards are not worth the trouble.
Most modern IDE drives have between 256K and 512K of on-board cache to speed up data access. Windows 95 uses system RAM to further cache the data, but it does this intelligently, increasing and decreasing the cache to suit the requirements of different programs that are running. You will get better overall performance by adding the extra RAM into the main system memory, rather than dedicating it to a disk cache. In that way, if the RAM is not needed for disk caching, Win95 can re-allocate it to other processes that are asking for it.
- Ian Yates