Stop Microsoft
Miscellaneous => The Lounge => Topic started by: Aloone_Jonez on 10 March 2006, 20:01
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I have an old 486 33MHz laptop with 4MB of RAM, it has a craptacular 256kB VGA card with a 640x480 screen.
What operating system do you recommend I install on it?
It currently struggles to run Windows 95 and I'm sick and tired of it so I was thinking about installing MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 but then I thought I might try out a superiour non-MS alternative.
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DSL or Slackware (maybe an older version. Not sure.), or if you're up for an adventure, LFS. And I can't imagine doing much on such a machine, until I setup an X server and get it connected to my proper machine (I wanna get something like that setup someday, just for a laugh and the convenience of having a portable computer I can use around the house.).
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I have an old 486 33MHz laptop with 4MB of RAM, it has a craptacular 256kB VGA card with a 640x480 screen.
What operating system do you recommend I install on it?
It currently struggles to run Windows 95 and I'm sick and tired of it so I was thinking about installing MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 but then I thought I might try out a superiour non-MS alternative.
A computer can actually strugle with 95?
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Yeah, mine did. Wouldnt boot it at all. Athlon 64 3400 and 95 couldnt start up :D.
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I have an old 486 33MHz laptop with 4MB of RAM, it has a craptacular 256kB VGA card with a 640x480 screen.
What operating system do you recommend I install on it?
It currently struggles to run Windows 95 and I'm sick and tired of it so I was thinking about installing MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 but then I thought I might try out a superiour non-MS alternative.
Well Jonesy, I always hear you talking about FreeDOS. There you have it! ;)
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That could be the answer, I don't know if trying to get Linux to work on such an old machine is really worth the trouble. I'm considering installing an MS-DOS alternative like FreeDOS, DR-DOS or even FreeDOS32 which even though still in the early stages of development can run some djgpp and Windows console programs.
I'm stuck between these choices which one would you recommend?
By the way this machine doesn't even have a CD-ROM.
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I've had a LOT of boxes in my days.
Windows 95 will be a boatanchor on a 33 MHz system with 8MB of ram, much less 4 MB.
Even Windows 3.1 will struggle with that RAM if you try to do anything with it (like run Wordperfect or Word).
What will run very fast: DR-DOS. If you want a fast GUI layer, put OpenGEM/FreeGEM on top of it. That's what the OpenGEM and FreeGEM projects are there for.
A linux would be ok, but I think you would need to go with DSL. I don't think you could run really run X-windows with that little RAM, although it would make a very nice command line & SVGA box.
Actually, you seriously might want to consider OS/2, either version 2 or warp 3. With the blue spine editions you could run Windows 3.1 programs. You are still limited by that RAM, but OS/2 is really good with low RAM systems.
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Even Windows 3.1 will struggle with that RAM if you try to do anything with it (like run Wordperfect or Word).
I have a 25MHz 386 laptop with 4MB and Windows 3.0, and it runs rather well. I haven't been able to get WordPerfect 6.0 to run (requires 3.1 I think), but the only reason it would be slow is because WP6 sucked like that. I recall my 50MHz 486 with 4MB and WP6, it was indeed slow. WP6 wasn't "fast" until 2 or 3 years after the fact.
Besides, Windows Write is pretty good for a 1990-ish program. ;)
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Is the bus multiplier fixed? You should be able to clock it to 45 MHz without frying anything. 486's didn't even come with heat sinks. But with 4 meg of ram, only dos will run well (Win 3.1 and earlier were just gui's for dos).
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I had a 33 Mhz 386 laptop with a whopping 8 MB of ram with Win 3.1 on it. It ran word 6.0 ok (I didn't know about Linux then) until I tried to write real papers for school with it... then the memory became a real problem.
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for linux you could try tomsrtbt, mulinux or basic linux. but its not really worth it.
there are some pretty cool old school apps for dos out there.
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What will run very fast: DR-DOS. If you want a fast GUI layer, put OpenGEM/FreeGEM on top of it. That's what the OpenGEM and FreeGEM projects are there for.
Sounds good but what programs can I run under these graphical desktops?
Could I run ABIWord?
A linux would be ok, but I think you would need to go with DSL. I don't think you could run really run X-windows with that little RAM, although it would make a very nice command line & SVGA box.
SVGA?
What do you mean it only has a VGA card? 640x480 16 colours (or 256 at 320x480) you know the deal. :confused:
Actually, you seriously might want to consider OS/2, either version 2 or warp 3. With the blue spine editions you could run Windows 3.1 programs. You are still limited by that RAM, but OS/2 is really good with low RAM systems.
Is it free though? At least as in
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OS/2 isn't open source and I don't think it's free ether. There are however alternatives. Like this (http://www.ecomstation.com/). Also Wikipedia is God (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2#Future)
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This article may be helpful, but I haven't read it,
http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/revive-laptop.html
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OS/2 is not open source, nor is it free of charge. However you can get it on EBAY for really, really cheap amounts of money. I've seen it for like $3-$10. If you go that route, you should go with version 2 or Warp 3. Version 1 was weak, and Warp 4 really needs 8 MB.
Also, you didn't mention if it had a CD-ROM. If it doesn't, you should get the diskette version of OS/2.
There's lots of free software for OS/2 on Hobbs.
You can get DR-DOS free of charge for personal use still I think. Other DOS (MS-DOS, PC-DOS) would work too. FreeDOS is available, but not sure how stable it is at this point, and you may run into software compatibility issues.
OpenGEM and FreeGEM are open source and free of charge.
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Sounds good but what programs can I run under these graphical desktops?
Could I run ABIWord?
AbiWord requires 16MB RAM anyway, so, no.
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Thank you all for your suggestions, I think I'll try DR-DOS and one of those graphical desktops mobrien_12 is talking about.
Can anyone suggest of a decent Word processor that'll either run under plan DOS or one of these desktops?
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Can anyone suggest of a decent Word processor that'll either run under plan DOS or one of these desktops?
The GEM Word processor is available free of charge at FreeGEM and/or OpenGEM's site. It is somewhat limited compared to todays word processors, but give it a try and see if you like it.
For serious document preparation, LaTeX is available for DOS and OS/2 and all sorts of other operating systems at
http://ftp://tug.ctan.org/pub/tex-archive/systems/
LaTeX will run decently on that machine.
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DSL should work fine on it ...
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...not with 4mb ram
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OpenBSD, assuming you have a FPU on it (if it is post-i386, you have it). It can be run on older, assuming you don't mind recompiling the kernel with GPL_MATH_EMULATE. X will run on it in under 500m of disk space.
Word processing might be tricky. I use OpenOffice, but that won't wotk. Neither will KOffice. Abiword might if you can nab more RAM or make a big swap drive.
Install can be a -----, though. :)
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4 MB RAM :eek: is that even possible ... what the fuck runs on 4MB RAM ? Upgrade it ... if possible. I suppose most laptops aren't upgradable though :(
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It isn't upgradable and even if it was it wouldn't be worth it.
Lots of things can run on 4MB of RAM and it should be more than enough for simple wordprocessing and compiling small console programs.
How long have you been using computers for?
Most people nowadays don't use even half their computer's power and if they do it's wasted on running anit-virus software. Software is becomming more bloated, and I'm not just talking about Windows, OpenOffice and Linux are suffering from feature bloat too. Do you realise that as long as you're not playing any games or ripping any DVDs the amount of memory in your PC that's actually being used to store you data is minimal?
You can do a lot without using much memory, 10,000 word essay only takes 64KB to store and even a 2560x2024 16M colour image only takes 15MB! So I hope you can imagine that my 4MB laptop is way oversized for word processing, and my old p200 with 32MB of RAM is more than big enough for saving images I've taken with my digital camera providing I install fairly light software on them. I rest my case, for most simple computing tasks like web surfing and word processing with moderate sized images 16MB of RAM is probably enough for most applications.
EDIT:
I've downloaded all the DR-DOS images, now I've just got to get hold of some floppies and install this thing.
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AJ is right. I remember when that was a ridiculous amount of RAM and I used to get real work done. You can run Linux and BSD, just no X... X takes RAM.
DR-DOS will work nicely and run fast... just the 640k RAM Limit is there :(
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Most people nowadays don't use even half their computer's power and if they do it's wasted on running anit-virus software.
I think i use it all :)
int me_developer = 1;
The CPU is often at 99%
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Of course the CPU will be at 100% when you're compiling a program.
DR-DOS will work nicely and run fast... just the 640k RAM Limit is there
A common myth, while this is the case for 16-bit DOS programs, most newer and resource demanding programs like games use a DOS extender wich means they can address up to 4GB of memory as one linear flat segment some even support virtual memory. DR-DOS is very good in this respect, it includes a multi-tasker which can perform mult-threading and a built-in DOS extenter.
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Of course the CPU will be at 100% when you're compiling a program.
A common myth, while this is the case for 16-bit DOS programs, most newer and resource demanding programs like games use a DOS extender wich means they can address up to 4GB of memory as one linear flat segment some even support virtual memory. DR-DOS is very good in this respect, it includes a multi-tasker which can perform mult-threading and a built-in DOS extenter.
Well i spend a lot of time recompiling my code and making sure changes work, also Folding@Home uses a lot of CPU even when running as a low priority, not to mention media players take some CPU time for decoding :)
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If you mean ripping DVDs then yes, but just watching them doesn't use much power, even my old p200 could play most movie files on the Internet and that was only two years ago.
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I spend lots of time compiling things but, because I can still use the computer for browsing the web and everything else I normally do, I don't mind.
2600+ and 256mb RAM are more than enough for (even?) me.
Hell I can open all the hungry graphical apps on my system and switch to and from them doing work pretty damn fast.
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The biggest bottleneck as far as noticeable speed is concerned is the hardisk and Internet connection speed, RAM and CPU don't make much difference most of the time.
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Of course the CPU will be at 100% when you're compiling a program.
A common myth, while this is the case for 16-bit DOS programs, most newer and resource demanding programs like games use a DOS extender wich means they can address up to 4GB of memory as one linear flat segment some even support virtual memory. DR-DOS is very good in this respect, it includes a multi-tasker which can perform mult-threading and a built-in DOS extenter.
Yes, and DR-DOS has DPMI built in, so you don't have to downlaod CWSDPMI or run Windows 3.1 to use 32 bit DPMI programs. DR-DOS is really a very advanced, feature-rich DOS, but most of the DOS programs I ran were 16 bit, except for games.
Anyhoo... I found a page you might like
http://www.drdos.net/faq/
Has some nice DR-DOS system tweaks.