Well, I don't consider things like real protected-mode multitasking and a modern networking stack to be "little advantage", but that may just reflect the sorts of things I tend to do. Depends on your idea of "useful work". Until recently my laptop was almost exactly that sort of machine (first-gen Pentium, 16M, a few gig disk), and I did plenty of stuff I considered useful on it. (I've since got a 32M memory card to replace the 8M that was in there, so it's now at 40M - at 16M I couldn't turn on the live backup stuff or it would start to page if I so much as typed return to the shell.) Of course, I also wasn't using Gnome and Netscane and suchlike. (My OS was (is) a relatively old rev of NetBSD.) /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

At 9:13 PM -0500 8/27/06, Choctaw Bob wrote: It's well on topic, I had a P90 laptop with 16MB RAM, and an 800MB HD in 1995. One bit of advice, try to get a bit more RAM, does it use 30-pin SIMMs or 72-pin SIMMs? If it uses 72-pin SIMMs (and the odds are pretty good that it does), then it should be very easy to get a decent amount of RAM (48-64MB would be good) in there. For a Unix variant, I'd recommend OpenBSD, it does very, very well on low memory systems. You don't mention what you have for a video card, a Matrox Millenium, or Matrox Millenium II has great compatibility with alternative OS's. The real question might be what are you looking to do with the system? If you can bump up the RAM, and are looking for something interesting to try, I'd be inclined to recommend OPENSTEP, or BeOS if you can get them, otherwise AROS, or a couple of the other alternative OS's might be fun. Check out http://www.osnews.com for ideas. Zane -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet) | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |

Am 27 Aug 2006 21:13 meinte Choctaw Bob: Depends what you considere usefull. If you like Unix, then Linux is a good choice. With a little tuneing and a very lightwight window manager, you may run most actual stuff without problems. In fact, even a fattened Gnome or a KDE heavywight will run as fast ast Win 98 does. In all cases, the real bottleneck is not the CPU, but rather your memory. If possible, and most Pentium-75 boards can, you should upgrade to 64 MB - then even WinXP is doable. In fact, especialy on slow CPUs, XP outperforms 98 by 5-15% due way better cache and memory handling. In comparsion, 98 is the bloated OS. Also XP is _way_ more responsive to user interaction. they did a great job to give early feedback, so that applications _feel_ faster under XP, than by using 98. Thats in real world application more important than real speed. isn't it? Said that, we have to agree that the 75 is not realy a race horce, nor has been when it was new - the 50 MHz bus speed has been a way to sell lower performance ('value') PCs. If your PC has bus speed setings, it might be worth a try to set it to 60 or 66 MHz, resulting in a 90/100 MHz CPU speed. Most Pentium, especialy the late versions weill easy follow. And you could try to set the multiplier to more than 1.5. I've seen Pentium 90 going up to serve as 166. Mult Bus Speed iComp 1.0 50 50 (Never official) 1.0 60 60 510 1.0 66 66 567 1.5 50 75 610 1.5 60 90 735 1.5 66 100 815 2.0 50 100 (Never official) 2.0 60 120 1000 2.0 66 133 1110 2.5 50 125 (Never official) 2.5 60 150 1176 2.5 66 166 1308 3.0 50 150 (Never official) 3.0 60 180 1270 (Only very short available) 3.0 66 200 ~1420 Especialy the comparsion P166/P180 shows the influence of bus speed vs. CPU Speed. a P166 (66 MHz x 2.5) is in real world apps faster than a P180 (60 MHz x 3.0). Thats also why the P180 was only around for a real short time. So, speeding up the bus is the best to get out more of your P75, since the restriction to 50 MHz bus speed was artificial (unlike the multiplier). Back then, with the open multipliers and various bus speeds, just by swaping jumpers or dip switches, the golden age of overclocking ruled. The basic .35 micron process was fine for some 300 MHz, meaning that made heat sink with fan given. This was very obvious with the PII that began with the same process and was widely seen only as 233 and 266 CPUs - the top notch 300 MHz model was not only rare, but also did run quite hot - shure signs for the maximum capability of the .35 process. Socket 7 was a great time. Now, coming back to systems, I still give out P166-P233MMX systems to people. A good configuration to run Office I found would be: P200 64 MB RAM 4+ Gig drive as C with all Apps 4+ Gig drive partitioned as Z/D where Z is a 512 MB dedicated swap. 1 DVD drive (if possible a writer at 40 Euro) WindowsXP Office2003 Firefox Such a machine can satisfy all every day (home-) office needs without problems, and they found quite some happy users arround here. Of course, you should not try to runn any video game - but when adding an old Nvidia Geforce2 or 4 card it'll even make lots of game fun. Linux (Gentoo with KDE) runs equaly well - except that the people I usualy give this machines to are not realy computer geeks. So, try to tickle a bit more Gruss H. -- VCF Europa 8.0 am 28/29.April 2007 in Muenchen http://www.vcfe.org/

This machine is a much lower spec than that (16MHx 80486, 8M RAM, 1.3G hard disk), and I'm running an older version of linux with no problems. And yes, I do useful work on it. Of course I don't run X (with a text only MDA card, I couldn't :-)). Butgcc runs fine, as does TeX. And numerous other programming tools. -tony

----- Original Message ----- From: "Choctaw Bob" <bob099 at centurytel.net> To: <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Sunday, August 27, 2006 9:13 PM Subject: Recommendations for operating system Of COURSE this is on-topic. CPM? GEOS? Do you people who think this is off topic or who are clamoring for an air-tight legal definition REALLY need to split hairs that badly? Or is it just some psychological compulsion? J