95 vs 98

[Mac the Knife]

I'm refurbishing an old 486DX4 (32MB RAM, 2GB and 1GB HDDs) so that my better 'alf can run Access97 (and DBase4) at work. Seems OK, but it is agonisingly slow even cleanly defragged. O/S is Win98SE.

I seem to recall that Win95 was less demanding of the machinery - anyone have any thoughts on whether it would be worth going backwards?

[pied piper]

You are well short of mem, so it might be worth bumping that up first before considering going down to 95.

[R O Tiree]

What you are doing is a bit like getting a Morris Minor to tow a 4-ton trailer. You have a number of problems, but first, a bit of background.....

As hardware speeds and capabilities have increased, so the software writers have been able to incorporate more bells and whistles into their code. Indeed, Microsoft are frequently accused of lazy programming, in that their applications have become positively monolithic over the years. The system you describe ran perfectly well in the early 90s with Windows 3.1 and the very earliest version of MS Office (5? can't remember). You'll probably find the motherboard bus is running at only 25Mhz, the processor at 100 MHz and the video card is going to be struggling as well.

The systems that Win 98 was designed to run on are P450 upwards, minimum of 64Mb RAM, and motherboard bus speeds of 66 - 100 MHz minimum. Both Win 98 and Office 97 make great demands on system resources (RAM, data transfer, video, processor, etc) which your system is woefully short of.

In short, although MS say that you can run Win 98 and Office 97 Pro on a DX4, it's like running through molasses. They say the same thing about Windows NT (386SX with 12 Mb RAM, so they say - you just can't do anything with it).

So, my advice is to get your better 'alf a spangly new machine (or at least a reasonable second hand one) as a belated Christmas / Valentine's / Birthday (early or late) present or she might end up taking her frustrations out on you! :)

[ExSimGuy]

Apart from the 100MHz processor (slow, but useable) and the slow motherboard clock, your biggest problem is going to be getting any more memory - the mem used on the old Pentiums is hard to get so I doubt if you'll get anything to fit a 486 (they keep changing the "standards" every time they change processor generations!)

As you have useable hard discs and so forth, and you are capable of "refurbishing", how about fitting a new motherboard with a Celeron or a AMD Duron (nice an cheap!) with at least 64k of "modern" memory. You can keep the HDDs and the floppies, but you may need to get a new case (the old PSUs are not compatible with new motherboards - "old" PSUs can be recognised by two connectors to the motherboard with one row of pins, "new" ones have a single connector with two rows of pins) but case/power supplies are very cheap. Also check if you have the right type of slot available for your old video card.

It won't be "blazing fast", but it'll be okay for your needs. Once you have worked out the budget for the upgrade, compare it with the cost of a new system and, if it's a significant saving go for the upgrade (with the new case/power supply, it'll look like a new box too!)

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What goes around . . .
. . often lands better!

[matelot]

Used to have a 486 DX 4 and 95 was OK. 98 was 'too bulky', demanded a lot of processor time and slowed everything to a crawl. Yes, lots of bells and whistles running in the background.

Get a new machine!

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Me, sweat? I'm that cool, it's condensation.

[SR-71]

Mac, if you live in the UK, really want to stay on a budget and know how to identify the RAM chips (what type/format) then let me know about the configuration as I migh know someone who has a 32Mg SIMM (guess it's one (or two) of these) on his spare parts "bin". Also, you've probably done this but if you haven't then I suggest that you remove any background image, system sound, background virus scanner/firewall. Use standard mouse drivers/cursors, switch off power managment and make sure the machine isn't set up for multiple users. If you have much of this running then that's probably all your physical RAM gone and half your virtual memory, is your HDD light going crazy all the time? Hope these little trick work. Worth a try.

It's not the destination but the journey that counts.

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ICQ# 91029795

[Mac the Knife]

Thanks to all for replies and suggestions. A drastically thinned 95, stripped of sounds, antivirus software, background whatzits, etc. puts in an acceptable performance. Unfortunately, findings the 4 x 16MB 30-pin SIMMS that I need to up it to 64MB seems almost impossible.

Incidentally, while setting up the PIII (now stable after 3 installs) I let my guard down for 2 days & ran without AV software. Result, MTX virus infection and a very tedious disinfect. Very nasty & tough to clean - only just up again. No data loss.

Lets all be careful out there...

(I preferred the line in the original first series - "Lets do it to them - before they do it to us".

[PPRuNe Dispatcher]

Just a data point for those of you who will install or update their virus software "in a little while"...

In the past month I've had infected emails from three seperate people. In each case I saw the email had a funny attachment, so instead of opening it I tried to save it to disk to see if VShield would catch it, and it did. Believe it or not, one of the people deliberately sent out a virus :mad:

If I'd been tired and not noticed the funny attachment, and if VShield hadn't been updated in the last two weeks, I would have been infected.

---PPD
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