Installed
-------------------------
IE 6.0
Media Player 6.4
Plus! 98*
3D Space Cadet Pinball**
KernelEx 4.5.2***
DirectX 9.0c
nvDVD (nVidia DVD) 2.0

* Deluxe CD Player, Spider Solitaire, Golf Lite 99, Lose your Marbles, McAfee VirusScan, etc.

** installed from the Plus! 95 CD

I'm planning to install .NET Framework 2.1
***CDBurnerXP (CD/DVD Burning Program), FireFox 8.0.1, and so on.

You must enjoy pain...

Seriously, Windows 95 on a 486 with IE 4 was painful enough... you're going to attempt installing Firefox 8.0.1 on it? Will that even work? And if it does, *WHY*?!

My 486's motherboard supposedly supported up to 128mb of ram. Firefox on 512mb of ram is painful enough. I can't imagine firefox on 128 or even 64 for that matter. (Plus mozilla removed 9x support like back in version 3.)
Plus for a computer that old, an AV isn't even that necessary. I wish I could say the same for 2k, but I've seen installs of 2k get owned during setup by code red.

The web has evolved from a simpler document oriented delivery system (with just HTML) in the 486 age to an application framework (HTML5, JS, CSS, et al) to meet consumer demands and purpose the power growth of personal computers since the original web.

That said your expectations to use firefox 8 (keyword here is use, if half the web doesn't work that's not very useful now is it) on such old hardware is purely crazy.

Proof: (I took this picture like in 2004 and it's still relevant now, and this is slashdot of all places, which used like crap from 1999 up until a few years ago)


That being said, I actually still *use* my 486. It's useful for typing papers where I don't get as distracted easily from stuff online.

I don't use my 486 at all, and the only reason I keep it is nostalgia. I can't imagine trying to do work on it.

If I want to be free of online distractions, I can login to my server and block internet access to my machine. I could go a step further and block all access to my machine, so if I want to re-enable it, I have to actually get up and log in to the server console.

As far as Firefox 8.0.1 running on 98, you could probably try KernelEx and see if that will work, but other than for education / novelty purposes, it's not worth messing with.

I've slowly stopped using it in recent months, mainly because I need equation support for technical memos and stuff. Actually also, I used office 97/2000 up until about a year and a half ago when I messed with the office 2010 beta. I saw no real reason to upgrade because of features or anything before that. (Office really hasn't changed from office 5.1? (whatever's on the 486) up until 2007.)

I used to refuse to use anything but 97... then I tried 2000 and I liked it ok. I kind of skipped over XP and started using 2003. I did go back on a few machines to give XP a try and I liked XP fairly well.

I used 2003 until I think 2009 or so. Then I forced myself to use 2007. Didn't really like it, felt so unfinished and awkward. Then I upgraded to 2010 when they offered the public beta. It was much better. More polished than 2007. I've been using it since then. And recently I've decided to adopt the new file format. I objected to it for a while, and some of that time was actually because I had professors that wouldn't accept documents in the new format. Now a days, since just about every computer on campus is running Office 2010 or at least 2007, they can read the files just fine so they've stopped requiring the old format.

Our professors used to accept wordperfect files until this semester, now the requirements are either the openxml format, the old office format, or the open-document format. I tend to stick to .odt for word files, the old excel format for spreadsheets, and .pptx for power points. In comparison of file sizes, for a 97-2003 word document, a 1700kb file would be in docx as a 900kb file, or a 850kb file for odt. Even though file size doesn't matter that much, it kind of does for network drives where you have to submit files to.

It's nice to see OpenDocument acceptance. Most people/places I'm aware of like to only accept Microsoft's formats, yielding cluelessness when ODF is even mentioned o_0

I agree with you here. I keep old PCs for limited purposes: Web browsing, to a limited extent, writing papers, playing old NFS games, Paint, and Minesweeper. lol.



128M on a 486? That's... interesting, as most of them probably ran Win3.x, which was 16 bit, which was - I think - limited to 64M of RAM. Don't think anyone would've cared about RAM limitation by architecture then though... (is that right? 32-bit can supposedly address up to 4GB, or 3.25, or 3.33 or something...)

and also, what do you mean you've seen Win2000 installs get "owned during setup"? How would a worm or virus infect a non-networked PC during Windows Setup?? (and even if it's got a network card, and is attached to a network, in my experience the NIC *never* works with PnP on WinXP and older.) And wouldn't another PC on the network have to distribute the worm/virus/etc?

I use ClamWin AV on 2000/XP & +, I use ClamWin on *some* Win98 PCs but it's really not necessary for the most part. I don't use Win98 machines to mass download warez anyway, lol. And while you might say that old browsers have old vulnerabilities - they do, so don't use them. Opera FTW

running 10.63 on all Windows 98 PCs, and 11.11 on anything newer

Yeah, I agree that 2010 is a great improvement over '07, but I still like older versions of office for everything except PowerPoint.

I mean, currently, I think Office '97 is the best option for Win9x PCs, rather than like OO.o 2.2.x... OpenOffice is okay but it gets frustrating at times, things are a little harder than they should be to do (i.e. first page header. I've figured it out now, but still like Office '97's way of it better.) In fact, I wish there was a way to have a different header on *every page* of a document. Never need them other than on the first one anyway.

I like Word '97 the best, by far. I can customize the toolbars, which is nice, and that's the only flexibility I need for word processing. I don't use Excel a whole lot but I liked Excel '97, as well as '03. They were both nice. One thing about Word '03, was the thesaurus, which I think was not installed in '97 by default. And God, that stupid paperclip... I finally caught on not to install it during Setup.

PowerPoint, however, I like new versions better - presentations are where layout and eye candy matter, as opposed to dox and spreadsheets. I like the new look of PPT 2010 and its features, but I have to say Apple's Keynote can do some really impressive effects & visuals. PPT '97 was decent for its time, but I mean you can tell when someone made their presentation in Office '95/'97... lol

You can customize the ribbon... And you can even export your customization's so you don't have to waste time re-customizing everything on a new installation.



PowerPoint presentations, in my opinion, don't need all that eye candy and effects. In fact, I find it quite distracting.

We experimented one day to see how long it would take for a unpatched install of 2000 and XP to get owned. The machines were already plugged in, etc and the machine running 2k apparently got infected during the network setup part of the 2k install. It's really unusual for a machine to be throwing a lot of traffic (Like its participating in a DoS attack during setup.) in the middle of an install, and after getting through setup, we ran an AV and found code red already there. Can't blame the install cd or anything, as it was an untouched copy of 2k SP2 and there was nothing else installed at that time. The copy of XP took ~10 minutes to get blaster after it finished install.

PowerPoint presentations just need to die period.

Powerpoints are okay, as long as they aren't super animated and the guy presenting doesn't read directly from them. That's super annoying.

Well yes, I agree with you - the way PPTs are often used as a presentation aid sucks. And yes, animations are quite annoying too.

But it is possible to make a *good* PowerPoint presentation. If you keep text to a minimum and focus on visual aids, i.e. large(r) pictures that represent what youre trying to explain. That way, the people viewing the presentation can understand the visuals (quickly), and afterwards, focus their attention on the presenter.

Anything more than 16Mb on Win3.1 is just a waste, hell from what I remember and with some recent gaming I was doing on my 486, 12Mb is probably the optimum amount, unless you plan on playing Battle Isle 1 or Wing Commander 3.