FOR THOSE WITH PENTIUM ENVY.

Byline: Chicago Tribune 

More folks are turning to upgrades in hopes of keeping up with the latest technology and delaying yet another computer purchase.

Some of you with 2-year-old computers are still recovering from the scads of overdrive chips that promised to turn your SX and DX models into zippy Pentium performers.

The latest offerings to approach with caution are ``upgrades in a box'' that offer a housing or box that resembles a Pentium tower. Ranging anywhere from $300 to $500, these boxes claim you can transfer the innards of your 386 SX and above to one of these boxes and poof! - you have a Pentium-level computer.

Well, not quite.

Especially the way a Chicago-area computer repair shop owner, who described these boxes as ``trying to start a car with a Duracell,'' tells it. In order to preserve what little sanity this man has left, we have agreed to only reveal part of his screen name - TLB; his company is swamped with requests for these upgrades. TLB also puts up with a lot of abuse once customers find they need to make hundreds of dollars more in purchases in order to get near-Pentium performance. Let's go through a very short shopping list.

First, these boxes include RAM, but all memory is not compatible. TLB says it can cost up to $350 for a SIMM stacker that will accept your 30-pin SIMMs and make it work with the newer, zippier 72 pins.

Second and last, any SX or DX model will need a math co-processor. After all, that is what makes a Pentium just that. So add on about $500.

Shocking, isn't it? So that ``upgrade in a box'' actually costs from $1,150 to $1,350. You can get near-Pentium to Pentium-level performance depending on the age and model of your computer, but not for the price of a box alone.