OK, it's admission time. I used to work heavily on the development of our PCs when we built them from scratch but now, just like all other PC makers, our machines are just a bunch of Far Eastern components bolted together so I work on other types of more interesting computing devices. As such my in depth knowledge of Amstrad PC's stops at about the 5xxx range so 6486, 7386/7486, 8486, 9486 and 9555 are a bit of a mystery to me (apart from the fact that I use a 9486 for my day to day work). I can help a bit about adding SIMMs, hard drives or upgrading processors because I have done that to my own 9486 but it might be better to contact Viglen/Amstrad Direct (who sell the machines) on phone number 0990 933933 (a local rate call) if you have a query. If you want to consider upgrading then I'm told that they normally recommend Powermark on 0181 956 7000 as a source of components and advice.

As a few rough words of guidance - most of the machines use 72 pin SIMMs for RAM upgrade and there are no jumpers to set. If the BIOS has a "disable parity check" option then you can get "non parity" SIMMs, otherwise they'll have to be parity.

As far as hard disks goes the machines all have IDE interfaces so plugging on a larger drive is just as simple as physically connecting the drive (setting master/slave jumpers if you are going to have two) and setting the user settable paramters in the BIOS - most BIOS's have an "autodetect" feature that does this automatically. The only slight problem with HDs is those over 512MB. The earlier machines don't have "Logical Block Addressing" (LBA) so will not directly support drives over 512MB capacity but as most drives over that figure (including the Seagate 1GB I have in my machine) come with a copy of Ontrack's Disk Manager software this gets round the problem anyway (I use DOS, Windows 95 and Windows NT on mine with no problems).

Someone asked me whether this was possible and as I know all about this because I fitted a 4G drive alongside the existing 1G drive in my parent's Integra I thought I'd share it here. I have to admit that it ain't easy cos the Integra wasn't designed to take two hard drives but...

The first thing I had to do was replace the hard drive IDE cable inside the machine with a "standard" one that has two connectors in line. That way you can hang the two hard drives off the primary IDE and the CD remains attached to the secondary IDE.

The next problem is the four wire power connector. Again there isn't a free one inside so you need to make (buy?) a power cable splitter with one socket and two plugs that can then provide power to both hard drives.

The final physical problem is that there simply isn't room inside the case to accomodate a second hard drive but I got around this by using rigid plastic sheet to insulate the new drive and then just rested it in the cavity behind the half card on the right hand side but this does mean that it is effectively loose inside so the computer should never be moved (use of liberal amounts of gaffer tape may be able to overcome this to a certain extent.

Once I had sorted these physical problems the rest was plain sailing because the motherboard and BIOS inside an Integra are really just standard PC parts and therefore have built in support for up to four IDE devices. So it was a simple matter of starting the machine pressing [Del] to enter the BIOS and then getting it to autodetect the new drive under fixed disk settings. There was no problem with this and then I could just boot to a C:\> prompt and do the usual stuff with FDISK and FORMAT to make the new drive work. Of course the only potential "gotcha" here is that in Windows 95 you can't have a drive bigger than 2GB so the 4GB had to be split into two 2GB partitions during the FDISKing.