what's a skip? is english your first language?
Originally posted by: JonathanYoung
Here's what I run with my 486SX2-66 and 64MB RAM:
Windows 95 OSR2
Netscape 4
mIRC
Doom
Doom 2
Wing Commander 1
Wing Commander 2
Massage SMS emulator
MS Office 95
Twinbridge Chinese WP
So, even though my 486 is a piece of crap relative to my Athlon XP, it's still very useful as a spare (and quiet) computer.
Originally posted by: Bleep
what's a skip? is english your first language?
What a a$$!! Just because you do not know what a skip is does that make the poster ignorant?
You probably dont know what a Frap is either, so I guess you are the one that needs language training.
Bleep
Originally posted by: wpeng
Hey, Phooey, that's the other suggestion I've heard of. Turning it into a firewall/router. How do you go about doing that? And with which version of Linux?
Originally posted by: sisooktom
Originally posted by: Tostada
Originally posted by: wpeng
My parents recently ran across our old 486 computer in the basement. They said we should just throw it out. What else is there to do with old computers? I've been told you can do *something* with it, but I don't remember. I can't donate it. No one would want to buy it. It probably won't be worth anything in the next 50 years.
Should I just throw it out?
The important part is how much RAM it has. If you have a couple of old computers and you can get together more than 16MB of RAM, you can actually make a machine that runs Win95 plenty fast. Obviously it's not worth the price of buying more memory for it, though, so if it has less than 16MB, I'd just save the RAM and throw the machine away.
A full install of the original Win95 can fit in 20MB if you pull out a few stupid things like MSN. You'd be surprised how fast it is for using Office 97 or earlier stuff.
The real problem is when you try to install Internet Explorer. If you install IE4 or higher, the whole machine will instantly drag to a halt, even when you're not using the browser. As long as you don't do that, it's a decent machine for some things.
If you install something like Firefox without JAVA support, the machine should be decent for some web surfing.
Uhh, no. I had a 486SX 25. The thing was a POS from the day it was released. It's not even a true 486, as the data bus is only 16 bits wide. Hence the SX moniker. I seriously doubt the box will run Win95, and even if it did, even Firefox would be unusably slow.
Originally posted by: vegetation
Actually, the SX of the Intel 486 line just lacks an FPU and is a full 32 bit path -- the SX of the 386 line was a 16 bit memory bus and none of them had an onboard FPU. I believe the Cyrix 486SX clones only had a 16 bit memory bus so you may have had one of those. Even a 486-66 is too slow for a fun web experience though. I remember slow 486's would pause noticeably just decompressing jpegs. You could disable all image loading in a web browser I suppose, but why would anyone want to go through that. If you want to play old games, then I suppose it's worth that. But running an OS to view web pages is out of the question unless you enjoy torture. The ideas of turning it into a router may have been feasible 6 years ago when routers would cost over $100 but when you can get one free after rebate, or a wireless router for $20 these days, it just makes no sense, plus wastes electricity. In my experience, the minimum for an old-machine to play around with would be at least a pentium classic -- they display web pages fast and can run up to win98 without sweat.
Originally posted by: Tostada
Well, with 64MB you're set. You could run Win98 SE just fine if you wanted to. The original poster, however, refuses to tell us how much RAM he has.
It's likely around 8 - 16MB. When Win95 was released, 8MB was pretty standard but you wanted 16MB. The best way to get decent performance is to have the original release of Win95 and strip it down a little.
I had 64MB EDO in a Cyrix in late 1996, which was pretty unheard of and cost me a little over $400 just for the memory. There's not much chance of him having more than 16MB in a 486SX unless they gave it a big upgrade around 1997-98.
My first computer I bought used and it was a 486DX33 on a proprietary local bus MB. Visa Local Bus standard hadn't been arrived at yet. This thing came with 4 MB RAM, and Windows 3.1 It's true, the 486SX lacked a math coprocessor, but mine had it. Not long afterward I bought a Cyrix 486DX66 Intel replacement CPU, and it worked fine in that box. Picked up 4 100 MB chips at a computer show and had 8 MB, upgraded to Windows for Workgroups 3.1, a significant improvement over Windows 3.1. I think it incorporated some 32 bit processing - the reading and writing to HD aspects. After a while, I upgraded that machine to 20 MB and Win95 OSR2. Something started oozing on the MB and I got rid of the box, but I still have the CPUs and RAM, including the original 486DX33! Still have my second computer, though, which I built from the ground up, a Tyan Tomcat 1. Maybe I'll bring it to Office Depot next week. My next two boxes I still use. Will Office Depot accept parts or just whole computers?Originally posted by: sisooktom
Originally posted by: vegetation
Actually, the SX of the Intel 486 line just lacks an FPU and is a full 32 bit path -- the SX of the 386 line was a 16 bit memory bus and none of them had an onboard FPU. I believe the Cyrix 486SX clones only had a 16 bit memory bus so you may have had one of those. Even a 486-66 is too slow for a fun web experience though. I remember slow 486's would pause noticeably just decompressing jpegs. You could disable all image loading in a web browser I suppose, but why would anyone want to go through that. If you want to play old games, then I suppose it's worth that. But running an OS to view web pages is out of the question unless you enjoy torture. The ideas of turning it into a router may have been feasible 6 years ago when routers would cost over $100 but when you can get one free after rebate, or a wireless router for $20 these days, it just makes no sense, plus wastes electricity. In my experience, the minimum for an old-machine to play around with would be at least a pentium classic -- they display web pages fast and can run up to win98 without sweat.
No, I had a genuine Intel 486 SX. Trust me, it was a 16 bit data bus. The registers were 32 bit, therefore I guess technically it was a 486, but it was pretty crippled. You are correct that it lacked an FPU. Anyway, we pretty much agree that it is useless for anything other than a paperweight nowadays
Originally posted by: Tostada
Originally posted by: wpeng
My parents recently ran across our old 486 computer in the basement. They said we should just throw it out. What else is there to do with old computers? I've been told you can do *something* with it, but I don't remember. I can't donate it. No one would want to buy it. It probably won't be worth anything in the next 50 years.
Should I just throw it out?
The important part is how much RAM it has. If you have a couple of old computers and you can get together more than 16MB of RAM, you can actually make a machine that runs Win95 plenty fast. Obviously it's not worth the price of buying more memory for it, though, so if it has less than 16MB, I'd just save the RAM and throw the machine away.
A full install of the original Win95 can fit in 20MB if you pull out a few stupid things like MSN. You'd be surprised how fast it is for using Office 97 or earlier stuff.
The real problem is when you try to install Internet Explorer. If you install IE4 or higher, the whole machine will instantly drag to a halt, even when you're not using the browser. As long as you don't do that, it's a decent machine for some things.
If you install something like Firefox without JAVA support, the machine should be decent for some web surfing.
Originally posted by: paendragon
Dunno if this is your cup of tea - but here's what I did once -
One year while I was working at a medical center in Houston, we were given dozens of out-dated computers (386's & 486's with an occasional odd pentium 100/133 thrown in the mix) and told to discard them. So we took them out to the industrial trash dumpster out behind the facility and made a day out of experimenting on how those suckers came apart when dropped, beat, kicked etc etc.
We all spend so much time protecting our precious, expensive rigs, so it was just such a wild experience that cut against the grain, destroying all those machines...very surreal...and half way into it - the beast inside comes out and oh man is it fun! like being 10 years-old again, shooting B*B's at glass windows (ohyeah - don't do that...parents don't dig it...not to mention the cops).
pd
Originally posted by: sisooktom
Uhh, no. I had a 486SX 25. The thing was a POS from the day it was released. It's not even a true 486, as the data bus is only 16 bits wide. Hence the SX moniker.
Originally posted by: Delorian
for all of you looking to play old abandonware, check out dosbox. It has some incompatibilities but I've found much more of my old games will play than won't.
dosbox rules!
Originally posted by: otispunkmeyer
my college has a big clean out of junk computers every couple of years......we jus got all brand new dell pc's with TFT's and CD-Rw, the old dell's (celeron 500's) go in the basment..called the bunker, and the ones that were in there....286's and 486's n a few pentium pro's simply went in a skip! all 100+ of them
so much fun.......how high can u throw a 286?, how far away from the skip can u manage? mine was the best i threw a 486 and it caught the corner of the skip an jus exploeded in a shower of dust and PCB
Originally posted by: ming2020
Originally posted by: Delorian
for all of you looking to play old abandonware, check out dosbox. It has some incompatibilities but I've found much more of my old games will play than won't.
dosbox rules!
Yeah, it finally got Star Control 2 running with my soundcard though it still stutters intermittently. The free UrQuan Masters is pretty good too but nothing replaces the original. Other titles I'm gonna try out under dosbox include LucasArts' Full Throttle, System Shock I, and Hexen Deathkings mission pack.
Still, there are some titles that just simply require an 286 16MHz at most. Wing Commander I, Ultima VI, and the rest of Origin Systems' CRPG titles (Martian Dreams, Savage Empire, Bad Blood...) come to mind.