Old Dinasour

[onegojoe]

Saved an old IBM from the trash pile and opened it up. It is about 9 years old. It is an old TX486DLC/E 40 GA on the chip on the board. It has an empty overdrive socket. Had some old memory chips so I upped memory to a gargantuan 40 mb. Has Win3.1 on it. It still runs and boots right up into Win3.1. My question is if I go to expense of putting a cdrom in it (about $30) will it run Win95 or Win98? I wonder if I could still find an overdrive chip for it and how much would that speed it up?

[markp62]

You might get 95 to run, 98 needs a 66mhz, you currently have 40mhz.
Google has a bunch of hits on it using TX486DLC/E as the search.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&i...=Google+Search
But finding a overdrive 100mhz for it might be hard to do. Someone on Ebay may have one.
This page has photos of what you are looking for.

[onegojoe]

Thanks for the links. I see a texas instrument chip TI486DX2-80 3.45v. I think this may be the overdrive chip for the TX486dlc/e 40 ga. It is doubling the speed from 40 to 80, but it says oem use only. It would probably be next to impossible to find.

[Eeyore]

I run Windows 95 on a 386sx 20mhz with 16mb RAM. So you should be able to do that much.

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[AlaricD]

I've run Win98 on a Cyrix 486DLC-40, although "run" is stretching it a bit. The installer won't let you install Win98 on a machine less than 66MHz, and, for some reason it also tests for a math co-processor. Because the 486DLC, like the 386DX, does not have an FPU, use the /nm switch on the setup command line to bypass the minimum system requirements check.

That empty "overdrive" socket is almost certainly a 387 socket -- if you want an FPU look for the Cyrix 387DX-40, or clock it down to 33MHz and use a 33MHz 387.

However, Win95 OSR2 runs much faster than does Win98 on such old hardware.

[onegojoe]

Thanks for input. Didn't know so many still used these old processors. This old system has an old modem in it. Haven't tried it yet but it has jumpers on it facing out the back by the phone sockets. First time I have seen this on a modem. It has a Rockwell chip on the modem board. Don't know what kind or what speed but will try it and see how fast it is. Probably a 24 bps modem. I think I will invest $30 in a cdrom and install Win95 and see how it does.

[onegojoe]

It has a modem with jumpers out the back. I never saw one like that before. It has a Rockwell chip. Probably 24 bps. It also has an I/O board where everything is plugged into it. The hard drive is plugged into the I/O board and there is only the one plug for the hard drive. If I put a cdrom in it can I remove that cable and replace it with a double outlet cable so I can use one plug for the cdrom or will the I/O board carry double outlets?

[AlaricD]

Probably faster than 24 bits per second (bps). The slowest modems I remember used acoustic couplers and used the Bell 103 standard at a mind-blowing 110 baud (110 line status changes/second, which at that time was 110bps. 9600bps modems operate at 2400 baud, but use 3 bits per state. You can see why baud is no longer used to describe modem speeds.)

Your modem is probably 14.4Kbps (14.4 thousand bits per second), or maybe 28.8Kbps.

You should be able to replace the cable on the I/O controller with one that supports two IDE devices. Also, some sound cards have an IDE interface supporting CD-ROM drives (and some have 40-pin interfaces which look like IDE interfaces but are proprietary.)

[HondaNSX12]

Well, I once had a ThinkPad 760L which was composed of a 90 MHz Pentium Processor, 24 MB Ram, an 860 MB Hard Drive, and some other extras. It was able to run Windows 98, but I needed some Advil waiting for it to boot up. Windows 98 is crazy slow on old things, but Windows 95 is super fast (Windows 3.1 is a rocket!).

Don't run Windows 98. Run Windows 95 OSR2 and do some upgrades.

[steppenwolf]

if its too slow they make good doorstops

[steppenwolf]

a laptop that is that slow can have a lot of uses but a desktop can be dull yet they dont interfere with tv as much

[HondaNSX12]

if its too slow they make good doorstops

I say that is a very false statement. All of the computers that I own are extremely old (anywhere from 90 Mhz to 200 MHz), and I think they are very useful in the testing stage. If you think that they are pretty useless at their age, that's okay because it's your opinion, but I say that they make excellent computers just like the newer computers (as a matter of fact, olders one are much better power-wise because they consume less power!)

[steppenwolf]

yes theyre great for writing words on and checking email.. i hope they dont wind up in landfills ,, if i had room id store as many as i could

[onegojoe]

I'm back and I need some help pls!! I installed a 52X Samsung cdrom to that old dinosaur and I had a Win98 startup disk. I got another data cable for the hard drive that would handle the cdrom too. I hooked up the data cable and jumpered the cdrom as slave and the old hard drive as master and tried booting to the Win98 floppy startup disk. I got an error message saying something about a compressed cache file. I went into autoexec.bat and rem'd out the smartmon but didn't help. Anyone know how I can install the win95 cd disk so setup will install Win95??Is it possible to install it from within Win 3.1?

[steppenwolf]

use a win 98 startup disc to install win 95 or 98 .. make sure cdrom is on end of cable ,, ask the store for a driver as well to be used for win 3.1