I have an old PC sitting around doing nothing. I would like to turn it
into a machine for browsing internet. It is a Pentium Classic 200MHz
with 64MHz. It has a good 3dfx video card in it.

-  I am running Win95 on it. It runs fine. But Microsoft doesn't
support Win95 any more. This means I will not get any update from
Microsoft to patch their bugs. I am under the impression that this is
not safe to browse internet without the O/S properly updated.

-  I experimented running WinME on it. The PC ran noticably slower than
when it is in Win95. The performance is tolerable; but I hesistate to
use it because of the fact that the PC is below the minimum hardware
requirement for WinME.

-  I could have tried Linux. But its minimum hardware requirement for
graphic interface is Pentium-II (as for Red Hat Linux). Seem like my
Pentium Classic is not a good platform for Linux.

My Questions Are:

1.  From the info above, seems like I should stick with Win95. I am
just wondering what kind of risk I will expose myself to in internet if
I run a not-updated O/S?

2.  Currently, I have a hardware firewall/router to protect the home
network. If I lock down the browser to run at the highest security
mode, I can get away from not running personal firewall or anti-virus
software on it, right?

Thanks in advance for any info.

Jay Chan

On 7 Mar 2005 12:04:21 -0800, jaykc***@hotmail.com wrote:

It has nothing to do with Win95.  It is your browser
accessing the internet, thus you need IE6, fully patched,
will make your web browsing as safe as anyone running XP
with IE6.  However, with this in mind and considering the
age of the system you might consider something other than
Internet Explorer.

If you disabled all the extra junk it'd be more like Win98.
Google search for "98lite", as it will help trim back WinME
to a better match for the hardware.

Disabling Shockwave Flash, scripting, animated GIFs, etc,
will do more to make your browsing satisfactory than
worrying about OS requirements.  Note also that web surfing
is mostly the same as it ever was, you don't "need" to load
up the fanciest new Linux distro with all the bells and
whistles to do that.  Even so, I think you abandoned Win95 a
little too quickly, it would've done the job.  At worst,
suppose it did get some spyware on it or similar, that's no
different than situation someone with a more modern system
is facing, they still have to follow (their choices of) safe
computing practices and perhaps scan for those
spywares/viri/trojans/adware/etc occasionally.

The operating system is not a risk.  The security holes in
the application used to access internet are the risk, and/or
other applications with open/accessible ports and
vulnerabilities, and the user habits- ie- Opening an email
with unknown attachments using any OS and Outlook[Express]
is a bad idea.


Maybe, but where do you plan on surfing?  Hard to surf for
very long where you're not constantly annoyed by popup
windows informing you that you need ActiveX or Java or
Shockwave Flash, etc, etc, if you disable all those.

Frankly, I'd just use a faster CPU.  If the motherboard has
dual voltage (separate vcore) that goes below 2.8V, you
ought to consider an AMD K6-2 or -3 upgrade for it.  Then
again these days even slightly newer systems are cheap,
getting over that "hump" for browsing might be worthwhile.
A P3 600 or Celeron 800 (CPU with 100MHz FSB) is about the
beginning of the performance era for little-to-no compromise
surfing including antivirus, firewall, etc., running too.

You could try one of the Linux live CDs. Like Knoppix or Damn Small
linux. You can try use them from CD (no need for harddrive in your
surfing machine) or you can install them on your harddrive. Both of
these run on very old machines. I have had installation in 100MHz
Pentium working quite well on surfing and lisening music.

You can find both of abowe mentioned distros and many more from list of
available CD distros:
http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=cd

Just for network browsing I suggest DSL. It is small, it has good
automatic hardware detection, has Firefox browser and Xmms media player
and much more.

This sounds _very_ promising.

I will try Damn Small Linux. If it doesn't work well, I will lose only
a few dollars.

Two questions:
-  Does it integrate well enough with an existing Windows network?
-  Can I use it to browse internet through a network router?

Thanks.

Jay Chan

On Tue, 08 Mar 2005 08:00:13 -0800, jaykchan wrote:

Show quoteHide quoteDon't know anything about Damn Small Linux in particular but Linux works
fine with Windows networks, in fact it sometimes works better than Windows
does. I've been in several situations where people with Windows boxes
(specifically XP) couldn't directly access any other Windows systems on a
network but they could pass files though a SAMBA share on my Linux laptop
because all of the Windows machines of various flavors could see my Linux
box. As for routers, that's a non-issue. A router is OS independent. You
administer them through a browser and access the internet through them by
specifying the routers IP address as your gateway (generally the default
address is 192.168.1.1 although some brands use 192.168.0.1).

Your big problem is RAM, if you have some spare RAM from another old
machine laying around I'd plug it in. If you can get it up to 128M or
better yet 192M it will make a big difference.

Thanks for the confirmation that the Linux box will work fine in a
Windows network environment, and internet through a router is also not
a problem.  Great!

I don't have any spare RAM chip lying around.  Therefore, 64MB RAM is
the most I can put into this old machine.  Moreover, the motherboard of
this PC cannot handle over 64MB RAM anyway.  Therefore, it has already
been maxed out.  I am hoping that the Damn Small Linux is small enough
to need very little memory.

Jay Chan

On Tue, 08 Mar 2005 12:07:10 -0500, General Schvantzkoph
<schvantzk***@yahoo.com> wrote:


LOL, it's funny, and yet I agree.


He might be choosing too much OS for his needs if 64MB won't
suffice.  Odds are high his motherboard chipset won't cache
over 64MB either.

On Tue, 08 Mar 2005 18:47:55 +0000, kony wrote:

Just wondering how many of the rest of you have had similar experiences? I
do FPGA consulting so I take my Linux laptop to various customer sites
where most of the machines are Windows boxes. I hook up with no problem
but when someone tries to do the same thing with an XP laptop they have
all sorts of trouble that no one can figure out. These are not
unsophisticated users, I'm talking about engineers who make there living
designing hardware and software. Problems range from not being able to
share a folder to things like 30 minute login times because someone
misconfigured Win2K server and no one know how to fix it. The quickest
solution is for me to use webmin to create a SAMBA shared folder and for
the Windows machines to pass data through my Linux box. With Windows
laptops the issue seems to be that people are afraid to change the network
settings when they switch environments because they figure they will screw
it up and they'll will never be able to hook up to their home network
again. I have scripts on my Linux laptop that switch environments with a
single command, something that can't been done with Windows.

Because the PC cannot boot from CD drive, I will need to install it
into the hard disk. I have one question that I hope you can answer:

   Does its installation program have an option to make the computer
dual boot to either Windows or Linus? My old computer has three
partitions: Windows occupies one partition, and I hope to install Linux
in one of the other partition.

Thanks for any information in advance.

Jay Chan

I cannot say whether the installation make your system Grub bootable. I
assume it could do that but you should check from the documentation.
There is great deal of information on Knoppix Forum.

http://www.knoppix.net/forum/

I personally like to make Poor Man's Install for Knoppix. I have XP
installed on my C: which is NTFS. I have followed the instructions on
the Knoppix documentation pages below. Installation is quite straight
forward and takes only few minutes given that you already have Knoppix
ISO downloaded.

http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Win_Partition

My boot.ini file looks like the following. See the last row, that is
starting the Knoppix Grub copied using PMI instructions.

[boot loader]
timeout=10
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP
Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
c:\grldr="Knoppix 3.6"

Thanks for the links.  I will check it out.

Jay Chan

On 7 Mar 2005 12:04:21 -0800, jaykc***@hotmail.com wrote:

If u want to update get Win98, but as you are only browsing 95 should
do.

Updates. U dont really need them, because viruses only attack newer os
like Win2000 or XP.

Only issues could be dialer. Best bet is to pull the plug after use.
ME is the worst MS ever created. Doesnt matter if u use it with old
machine or newest $$ PC.
Knoppix is very good. If you can wait the boot time. go for it.
Never used firewall/antivirus with Win98, no problems with that, until
i updated to Win2000...
Show quoteHide quote

Good to know that.  This means Win95 should be fine.  Seem like I will
choose the path-of-least-resistance and that will be Win95 because I
have already had the CD-ROM and all the other applications.

Thanks.

Jay Chan

<jaykc***@hotmail.com> wrote in message
Show quoteHide quotealthough win98 should work fine on your machine...
if your present win95 does everything you need... there is no need
to upgrade just becasue Microsoft has dropped support.

Good.  Thanks for the confirmation.

Jay Chan

bent cpu pins?
Trouble connecting to DUN with old modem
Cannot Set Boot.Ini Timeout to Zero
Diff between mobo versions.
NTFS? Hard dirve limit?
I want to clone my XP system from IDE to SATA drive
Questions about hardware..
Which Mainboard?
Xeon L2 cache question ...
Odd CD drive problem