Help With Home Computer

[OB_Cisco San Jose]

What I would do first is to check on the memory Ram onboard,check on the disk size for the Hard drive,check on the video card.Just do a check list of what is on board.
To run Win95/98 correctly you'll need 32megs ram and 64 would be great.
For Video it would be nice to get something that supports 2D/3D graphics with 8megs on board.
Check on the open slots to add boards,I'm sure yours would have ISA slots or EISA slots and would be better if it had PCI Slots.Check your hard drive and a 1.2 gig drive would work and if the machine came with 800meg hard drive that would be ok.Check your BIOS settings of the computer to make sure it will support the various hardware you install and this will also setup your clock and hard drive configurations.You can do format and system checks from the BIOS table also.Also check to make sure you have 3.5inch floppy drive onboard.Check your Hard drive controller to see if it will support your CDrom drive and Hard drive.The older 486 systems disk drive controllers would only support two Hard drives.IDE disk drive controllers are better.
Now what I would do is reformat your Hard drive by using Dos 6.0 or higher.You can find your format.exe on your DOS floppy and you should run Format/s on the C:drive this would put the system information on the boot partition and make you C:drive bootable.Make sure your 486 has a CDrom drive also makes it easy to install software and for the kids to run their games or CDs.If you don't have a sound card you might have to install one and their very cheap as low as $8.00,make sure all the hardware is in your system before you load Win95 or Win98 and you want to make sure that you use a full version load of Windows instead of the upgrade version makes it alot easier.Hope this helps out. Good Luck,Any problems e-mail me at CiscoJ@aol.com and I will try to help.

 

[Guest]

I second Cisco's post.

As an FYI, I think that the best "real world" video card around for the money is the ATI 3D Rage Charger 8mb...we buy ours at http://www.allstarshop.com

The hard drive limitation on older machines is a real pain in the @$#, also. If you have any experience with PCs, I would take it apart and get a good look at what you have to work with (part #s) and maybe post that so that we can give you a thumbs up on them for the os you're considering.

Good luck and I'll be glad to lend a hand as well.

BigDog

 

[OB_bhmadsen]

My seven-year-old daughter is already getting games and programs that can't be run on anything less than a P133 machine. Right now she has to spend time on "my" machine with her Christmas gifts. I told her the other day that I would get her a new "puter" for her room. The way I look at it, $500 is cheap to keep her off of the machine that I do all of my accounting with!

 

[OB_BrainO]

I recently aquired an old Epson brand 486 computer after my girlfriends work upgraded their computers and gave the old ones to their employees. Since it was on on office network, it wont go to windows. It starts in the DOS mode and the command setup.exe opens an option to install microsoft Windows 3.1, but asks for a disc in C drive to run the setup. I dont have a 3.1 disc but do have a windows 98 disc that came with my Gateway. If Cisco, or any others out there know how I can get this P.C. up and running i would appreciate it. I dont expect it to do as much as the Gateway. but if I can set it up for internet and a few games it will keep the kids busy. Thanks in advance.... :-) Brian

 

[OB_insinu8]

Buy a better machine for yourself and give her your "old" one.