>I manage a medical supply company in Johannesburg - South
>Africa which currently has 6 stand-alone P.C.'s, (all old
>486 machines) I want to upgrade all the P.C.'s to 200 MHz Pentium machines


Your best package (in my opinion) is Windows NT 4.0 . It offers so much
versatility, and ease of use! You have an excellent interface and your
Administrative options are easily accessed. It also probably has the
smallest learning curve of all your other network packages.

You will also want to consider what kind of cable to use. I recommend CAT5.
It's very reliable. Although standard coax. is still o.k.

If the computers are in a relatively small area, you may want to consider
just using Windows 95 and looping them all together. Otherwise, set up an NT
Server, with eight NT Workstations.

I notice you are running some older programs. If you partition your hard
drive in two, formatting the boot sector as a FAT 16 and the second
partition as NTFS, you should be able to use some of your older programs,
plus you guarantee yourself a better recovery, should any of the
workstations crash. By having your primary partition as a FAT 16, you will
still be able to boot into the system and recover data.

I know you want to watch costs, but when it comes to the networks, do it
right and spend a little extra the first time, because you don't want to be
working on something while users are depending on its services later.

The possibilities are really endless for your network. Hope some of this
information may have helped you.

Guido Piraino