Compaq Prosignia 320 - Back to Home

Back in June, I picked up this old Compaq Prosignia 320 for dirt cheap, sold to me by the same guy who sold me the HP 500B. It's quite a special find for me, as it's now the oldest x86-based computer in my collection, beating the Pavilion 7840 by a couple years. Online documentation for this model is sparse; I've yet to find a single photo of one online, other than my own.

The Prosignia 320

This machine has definitely seen better days. The front grill has been knocked in, the internals are pretty dusty, a rubber foot from the bottom of the case is missing, and the power button feels like it's about to fall off. Not unexpected for a 23 year old PC.

ISA/PCI slots of the Prosignia.

This is also the first computer in my collection to be equipped with an ISA slot; I don't have any ISA cards for it, but if I find any, at least I have a machine to use them with now.

The rear IO of the Prosignia.

This machine also has a modem & Ethernet card installed, both of which I'll probably remove & throw in to my box of random PCI cards.

The unusual case design of the Prosignia.

Blowing all the dust out was a lengthy process, but what was even worse was reassembling the case. This case design isn't one of Compaq's best; instead of a regular removable side panel, the entire top assembly comes off, and it's nearly impossible to get back on.

The Prosignia on my workbench.

After some more cleaning, it was on the workbench, ready to boot.

The splash screen of the Prosignia.

Other than the CMOS battery being dead, everything works just fine.

The next step: installing an IDE HDD.

The assortment of IDE HDDs.

These were my choices for HDDs:

The SpinPoint was the drive I decided to use. I spent about 20 minutes trying to get the drive to show up in the BIOS, before I realized the jumpers were wrong. After fixing the jumper issues, I got the drive working.

Some random install of Windows failing to work.

Apparently the drive had someone else's copy of Windows on it already, and it tried to boot, but couldn't.

The Win98 Setup screen.

Installing 98 was my next mission. I'd like to try NT4 on this machine eventually, but I just did 98 for now since I already had a 98 CD & boot floppy on hand.

The first boot of Win98.

After waiting an hour for the drive to format, I was able to get it installed.

Win98 with no drivers.

As the image timestamp indicates, it's been 2 months since I installed Win98, but I still haven't installed any graphics drivers. Thus, it's stuck at a miserable 640x480 & 16 colors.

There's still plenty I want to do with this machine, so maybe there will be a 2nd article sometime in the future. My next big project will be getting my MSI Socket 754 board running, though, so expect the next article to be on that.

Back to Home