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Barudan Controller Upgrade

I'm looking into upgrading the controller (PC) on my wifes Barudan 906T YS machine, which was manufactured in 1994. Unbelievably, this has a

286 based CPU w/2MB RAM and a whopping 20MB harddrive. It is quite doggy and really crawls when loading a design - much more so than her 1983 single-head model that I upgraded to a Pentium years ago using the QDT interface.

1994 was about the time that Pentiums were introduced so why would a "new" machine have technology so old? After seeing the price she paid for the original QDT "PC", which was equally old and obsolete at the time, I'm convince a major profit generator for these companies is to load their software on the oldest, cheapest hardware available but charge a premium and tout it as new technology.

Back to the problem at hand. I have quite an inventory of spare PCs and parts and know I could vastly improve the performance again. The mail control unit (minus the keyboard and floppy drives) is contained in a single drawer that slides into a bay that also includes other drawers for other functionality like power distribution etc. My thinking is that I would need interface cables to run from the replacement PC to the main board where this drawer snaps into place.

Has anyone successfully replaced these on a similar model and if so are such interface cables readily available?

Reply to
bill
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Apparently, no upgrade is possible. Barudan actually tried to tell me that a 286 processor was current technology in 1994. Funny, that's the year I bought my first Pentium. 286s were obsolete for 8 years by then. I'm having a hard time accepting that we bought a 1994 machine with

1984 technology. I guess my only recourse is to try to set up a serial connection and transfer designs one-painfully-slow-transfer-at-a-time back and forth to a connected PC. Other than now having 6 heads available, we are taking a step backwards with a 10 year newer machine.
Reply to
bill

snipped-for-privacy@good-home.net, HAS blest us all with:

Without going looking I am fairly certain 400DX was the open tourer in those days,, with anyone who knew overclocking a watercooled CPU to get any performance from WW3.1 using WP and Lotus as crossdesktop. I well remember running Acad R 11 and watching the lines being drawn on the desktop...thinking it was magic! Today it is Click n Blink..the ref is there :-)

Save me some legwork and tell me a laplink cable is not an option?

Hard to believe..eh?

le.ÞêêmÞ

Reply to
le.ÞêêmÞ

Having been in this business for 19 years, all I can say is what the embroidery machines need back in the day was good enough for a stitching machine. New machines are still behind in computer technology. Why, it's still is a sewing machine. Newer machines are now coming out with usb plug and I am sure at some point, wireless interface.

As far as hardware updating goes, why? Can you take your 1994 car and ask the dealer to upgrade it? Maybe, but at what cost. The same goes for the embroidery machines. You best bet is to add on if you need more production or sell older equipment and buy newer.

Reply to
JD

My 1994 car doesn't have a 1985 drivetrain. Frankly, I'm more worried about compatibility than performance. I've had difficulty finding parts for a 83 BMW I owned recently. Likewise, if the hard drive fails on this machine, can I find one to replace it? There's not much of that older stuff around without paying a "collector" price for it and none of the newer stuff (of which I have plenty on hand) is compatible. With only 20MB available on the harddrive, (and at 95% capacity), there is little wiggle room. I tried the serial connection but that doesn't seem to be working (can I find a replacement? - I doubt it) so to clean up requires a chain of floppies to transfer files. Back in the day, it was fine but today, it's just aggrevating. Especially since it really is (at it's core) just an older, slower PC in there. I'm really surprised someone hasn't developed an interface to that machine that would accept a newer faster processor.

I shouldn't let it get to me - after all, it is my wife's business.

Reply to
bill

Get a larger hardrive for cheap (say 20 Gig for $40). Forget the huge size and only use the first 540 megabytes. Partition the hardrive into c: d: e: f: g: h: i: j: etc... into 32 MByte partitions using Fdisk. I believe 32MByte was as large as MSDos could manage in one chunk and

540 MBYte was as large as the controller chip could handle. You may be able to purchase an old XT or PC hardrive like this for $5 someplace.

Now you have a mchine with a 32 MB C: drive ofr your OS and many other drives for different type of patterns and work.

Reply to
John P Bengi

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