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So I bought a PCI 486 board...

smeezekitty said:
I don't know what to say. It more or less worked right off the bat for me.
I think I had to update some network .dll but since you are running IE5.5 it should already be done.
Do you know what version of 95? System specs?

Are you using DHCP? I am using a static IP because I am using my Linux laptop as a wireless to ethernet relay.
Not sure it would matter though.
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Thanks for the reply Smeezekitty. I wondered if you had to update some network dll to get it to work. Do you think you could remember what it was? Something from Windows 98 maybe? I have a running Windows 98 system too, so I could probably find it. Opera 6.06 can be reinstalled, and works fine. I just can't get Opera 8.5 to work. It installs with not trouble, and opens up etc, just won't connect to the internet. And now that I have seen Opera 8.5 I just can't go back to Opera 6 again.., I cant! I won't! :p
 
Billyray said:
Thanks for the reply Smeezekitty. I wondered if you had to update some network dll to get it to work. Do you think you could remember what it was? Something from Windows 98 maybe? I have a running Windows 98 system too, so I could probably find it. Opera 6.06 can be reinstalled, and works fine. I just can't get Opera 8.5 to work. It installs with not trouble, and opens up etc, just won't connect to the internet. And now that I have seen Opera 8.5 I just can't go back to Opera 6 again.., I cant! I won't! :p
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I don't really remember, but I think all I needed to do to update it was install IE5 (which you already have)
Nothing from windows 98. I added a picture of my setup: http://postimg.org/image/xleus5dnj/
I had to upload it to postimg because Opera 8.5 didn't work with the forum attachment
 
Ok, I got it working. In fact I even had Opera 9.6 working. But it was just toooooooooooooooo sloooooooooooooow. I installed 8.5 again. Even that is soooooooooo slooooooooooooow on my 486/Win 95 setup. I can get slightly better performance using IE accelerator with IE 5.5. But I don't really surf the web on that machine. Thanks for the feedback though! Oh, the problem was I had to install a newer Winsock 2.
 
Well, I learned HTML back in the day of NCSA Mosaic. One of the rule of thumbs that I well remember was "No web page should have more than 90KB of content (images and text)".

Things have certainly changed.
 
Billyray said:
Ok, I got it working. In fact I even had Opera 9.6 working. But it was just toooooooooooooooo sloooooooooooooow. I installed 8.5 again. Even that is soooooooooo slooooooooooooow on my 486/Win 95 setup. I can get slightly better performance using IE accelerator with IE 5.5. But I don't really surf the web on that machine. Thanks for the feedback though! Oh, the problem was I had to install a newer Winsock 2.
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I am surprised you got 9.6 working. I needed to go to 98 to get 9.6 working. How did you do that?
How much RAM and what kind of CPU?
 
Billyray said:
Ok, I got it working. In fact I even had Opera 9.6 working. But it was just toooooooooooooooo sloooooooooooooow. I installed 8.5 again. Even that is soooooooooo slooooooooooooow on my 486/Win 95 setup. I can get slightly better performance using IE accelerator with IE 5.5. But I don't really surf the web on that machine. Thanks for the feedback though! Oh, the problem was I had to install a newer Winsock 2.
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Try disabling java-script for viewing this site. It also enabled me to attach files via another tab as opposed to the usual window. Seemed to work ok with the few retro computing site I visit on a regular basis.

I did that on my old Linux machine which has Opera 8.5 installed and it made a big difference as far as loading site content was concerned. Ok admittedly it's a P200mmx but it might help a bit all the same. At least it gives you 486 bragging rights :).

Top effort guys. I'll see if I can get my 486 Warp3 Connect box up.
 
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smeezekitty said:
I am surprised you got 9.6 working. I needed to go to 98 to get 9.6 working. How did you do that?
How much RAM and what kind of CPU?
Click to expand...

I have Windows 95 B running on a Gateway 2000 tower with a 66 Mhz 486 DX and 96 MB of Ram.

Thanks for all the tips on getting Opera 8.5 to work faster! :D I did disable Java right off the bat.
 
I am 64 MB of RAM but a 120MHz CPU. Being almost twice the CPU speed probably helps.
Maybe I am more tolerant to slow I don't know

Also Opera 8.5 may install adobe flash. On a slow CPU you don't want that enabled.

One tip to reduce the installation size of Opera 9 is to deleted the unused locales. (any language you don't speak)
 
I tried the suggested speedups. It did help turning off javascript, but not that much, at least not for this website. Using the native Windows appearance didn't change much either. If you want to go to an old-fashioned website, that is pretty friendly with old computers, you can try mine. I have a screen print from the Windows 95 machine. I updated the site in 2007 with flash, CSS, javascripts, ASP, you name it. But it's bad on old PCs. Turns out my old website is good for mobile devices too! Glad I kept it around as a subsite to the main site. :)

Win95.jpg
 
wesleyfurr said:
EDO came along in the Pentium era...I don't think even the early Pentiums supported EDO. It is possible a 486 board could use EDO, but I would be surprised if it would work. FPM = Fast Page Mode, EDO = Extended Data Out.

As for the amount of RAM...when Windows 98 and NT4 were common, 64Mb was a lot of RAM! 486's were also getting to be old technology by that time... 16-32Mb of RAM would likely serve you well with a 486 system. Also keep in mind that with a 486 and 72-pin SIMMs, you can add them in one at a time, they don't need to be in pairs, so you can easily expand as you see fit. I would also guess that 16Mb chips are going to be cheaper and easier to find than 32's...though either are on the large (and likely rare) side for FPM chips...

Video card...ATI, Cirrus Logic, S3...they were all fine in my experience.
Wesley
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We always put heatsinks and fans on Intel 486-33 and above. Most products besides Intel's 486 chips (AMD, Cyrix) shipped with a pre-installed heatsink, at least till the dx4 series. The original 5v Intel dx2 and dx4 chips all came with OEM coolers. It was when chips dropped back to 3.3v or 3.45v when OEMs began regularly shipping them without cooling packages, which lead to a lot of confusion and burned CPUs.

I built and sold hundreds of similar machines to NASA, Jet Propulsion lab, etc. We found the machines benchmarked faster using RAM slots fully and evenly -populated rather than sticking in one big stick. We didn't run EDO on 486 boards, although we favored 60 ns and could sometimes shave wait-states when we did, although it was tedious to develop the timing, keeping resetting the firmware settings with each failure. We used tons of S3 and Cirrus Logic because there was good native OS support for them across many OSs, and even good device driver cross-brand functionality. NASA mostly couldn't hang onto driver disks, so wanted hardware Win95 and NT supported natively from CD. That's more convenient now even than it was then. A good NE2000-clone NIC and a VESA-supporting VGA card would allow you to download, install, reboot, and download drivers from the OEM, if necessary.

Last thing, our pricey high-featured 486 boards began to throw faults, or worse, introduce data corruption to the hard drives when loaded with peak RAM and pushed close to CPU full-throttle. We finally narrowed the cause down to cache chips that didn't meet their rating, or which were not well-matched. But the timing variances were so small that we had to have our top-line tester re-engineered tobe able to repeatedly find them. Cost a LOT of money to realize that the best idea was to run a Pentium-class CPU and board if you needed to push big data with high integrity. The Air Force wasted 2 mil. on one flight test, arguing the point. Sometimes it costs money to 'save' money, or for every job there's an appropriate tool, eh?
 
Techasaurus said:
Last thing, our pricey high-featured 486 boards began to throw faults, or worse, introduce data corruption to the hard drives when loaded with peak RAM and pushed close to CPU full-throttle. We finally narrowed the cause down to cache chips that didn't meet their rating, or which were not well-matched.
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I'll vouch for that! ;) I've had a devil of a time getting my 486 up to max memory of 128 MB. I finally concluded it was the cache chips causing my problems. THey were not matched with the oem 128k ones, (20 ns vs. 15 ns) so I keep looking for new ones in hopes of eventually getting my RAM up to 128 MB. (It's 96 MB now, with just 128k of oem cache.)
 
Billyray said:
I'll vouch for that!
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Me too on that... 486 boards vary wildly in what they can support, and the vast majority of pre-PCI boards in particular choke badly on anything more than 16 megs of RAM, and cheap off-spec cache on the board is quite often the cause. It's like trying to get the vast majority of P3 era Celerons up past 256k -- even when the board claims to support it, with two perfectly good matching sticks, there's just something that gets in the way of having two 256 meg cards working at the same time -- when a pair of 128's or even a 128 + 256 works just fine (in either order)... then you find out the cache chip is either bogus or off-spec; which sucks at that point as it's usually surface mount so unlike older mobo's, you're SoL.

It's why I really like the board I've got my AM5x86-133 running at 150mhz in, since I was able to put 256 megs of EDO in it and it works just fine... which actually feels kind-of 'dirty' having sixteen times as much memory in it as I ever had on a 486 back in the day... That config is so weird as for some reason 98SE runs better on it than 95 does.
 
I think that I might have my cache timing a little tight because I get occasional GPF and IPFs

We always put heatsinks and fans on Intel 486-33 and above. Most products besides Intel's 486 chips (AMD, Cyrix) shipped with a pre-installed heatsink, at least till the dx4 series. The original 5v Intel dx2 and dx4 chips all came with OEM coolers. It was when chips dropped back to 3.3v or 3.45v when OEMs began regularly shipping them without cooling packages, which lead to a lot of confusion and burned CPUs.
Click to expand...
I am using an old AM2 heatsink without fan for now on my AM486DX-120. Seems to be working because the top of the CPU does not exceed the mid 40s C
 
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