Packard Bell 400 upgrade

I found my dads’ first computer in his attic the other day. A Packard Bell 400. I remember playing games on this when I was 4 to 8 years old. It still works but the only bootable disk I have is on a 5.25 floppy and that drive is broken. The 3.5 works but I really want to replace the bad drive and do some upgrades. Again the last time I saw this thing I was maybe 10 and I have no idea how to get the cover off and don’t want to break it. It looks like I have to drill through some rivets but maybe I’m just not seeing it. Any help on that area would be great, I saw a guy on youtube with a 500 model but he skipped to the part where the top was already off and I looked on the internet for a while but nothing. After the upgrades and messing around in Dos for a while, I would like to try and install an old version of linux on there just to see if I can.

Any help would be appreciated and it’s my first time here. Thanks

Some photos might help? No way this isn’t disassemble-able.

That is quite old! Does it have a 486 in it? I ran slackware on a 486 back in the day. I still have the CD for that :slight_smile:

I’ll shoot some photos when I get home. Again I saw a guy on YouTube with a PB500 and had the top off but he didn’t show how he got it off.

Again I was a small child the last time I used this but I called my dad he thinks it’s a x386 and I thought the same before I asked. I think the 500 had the 486 but I also think I can upgrade it if I can get it open.

It should slide apart. When I’m back at my computer I’ll take a better look at the photos, but to start with I’d unscrew the two screws on the bottom of the front panel and see what that does.

I did it didn’t do anything, I thought it would just slide but IDK, I will look at it right now and take those screws out anyway. Thanks for the help.

YESS I got it off. Thanks

I… oof. Packard Bells are hard to want to do anything with. They were budget machines, and more budget than eMachines was budget. They had 486SX’s when the Pentium MMX was new, and thats a giant difference.

I uh, I’d say keep the “same machine” but get a different board. Any board.

Thanks for the advice. I know it’s so funny my dad said he paid like 3500 for it with a Dot Matrix printer or something outrageous. I’m sure high end IBM machines were more like 10000.

The IBM was probably better value. The 386/486 Taiwan built motherboards of the time were not a great platform for stability. If something crashed, it was very difficult to debug.

Yeah PB were budget computers but they were the first computers that were IBM compatible. After opening up the chassis and looking at the parts I am wrong about the date. This computer had to have come out in 90 or 91. I was really young when I used this so I don’t really remember and my dad is 71 so I’m sure he doesn’t either. They didn’t have some of these parts in the late 80’s. The best cpu upgrade I can do is probably a x486. I don’t think it could handle a 5x86. I could probably upgrade the RAM and maybe put a video card in it. Still cool as hell that it works and when it doesn’t I am going to do a build in the case, LOL.

Any PCI slots in there? Or all ISA? That would date it. According to wiki, PCI was invented June 22, 1992.