I recently built a 486 PC based on the AMD 486DX2 66mhz CPU and a collection of parts off of Ebay, including a Trident 1MB VLB video card, generic multi-IO controller card, Sound Blaster 16, 3.5" and 5.25" floppies and a Digital Research 52X CDROM. I have 48megs of RAM on board.
I installed DOS 6 on it and it works perfectly fine and all the games I tried with it worked as expected. However, when I installed Win 3.1, the installation when fine, but subsequently all I get is the splash screen then back to the C: prompt when I try to run it. The weird part is that it works fine for a few minutes when the system has been shut down for a while, then it either freezes or I get weird errors. Again no issues with DOS.
What I have tried, all to no avail:
- reverted to the standard VGA driver for Windows
- replaced the VLB video card with an OAK 512K SVGA card
- Eliminated all unnecessary drivers from the config.sys and autoexec.bat files
- Put a heat sink and fan on the CPU (normally should not be needed for a 486DX2)
- Replaced all the SIMM RAM with a single 4meg SIMM
- Replaced the power supply with a new beefier one (300W)
Any thoughts as to how to approach this issue? Could it be the CPU or the motherboard? If it was either, wouldn't DOS be affected?