With a 1.2 gig hard disk, I assume you have support for LBA in the cmos
settings, which tells me you probably have on board ide and 72 pin simms for
memory.  I would add an additional 16 meg of ram and load win95.  For a 486
not on a network (the drivers need lots of ram to keep performance up) the
ram sweet spot is somewhere between 16 and 24 meg, after which the bang for
the buck starts to tail off.  You can sometimes find an Evergreen or
Kingston overdrive cpu off of ebay for 5 or 10 dollars that will fit any 486
using a 33 mhz bus, (486 bus speeds are usually 25, 33, or 40 mhz) and that
will give you low range Pentium performance.  With the ram upgrade alone you
would have a bunch of 32 bit browsers and email packages to choose from.  I
did this for a couple pc's way back when, and they worked fine for dial-up
modems, of course finding 56k modems for 486's presents another problem,
since you can't use winmodems.

If you want to be really adventurous, load linux instead of microsoft o/s.
That gives another set of software to choose from for browsing and email.
Tom Turak

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Rode [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Sunday, June 24, 2001 7:02 PM

I wouldn't want to use Win3.1 for this. I suppose an old  3.11 version of
Netscape or Mosaic  would work...and maybe there is one for OPERA. I am
sure you could find something but it wouldn't be worth the trouble.

What Processor do you have or can upgrade to ? The answer to that will
answer your questions...anything DX266 or above is usable and you can run
Win95 pretty well.Or if you  have 32 megs of RAM you can run NT4. Eight
megs of RAM won't cut it for anything...even Win 3.1. I know ..I lived with
8 megs of RAM on a  486 DX33 for a year back in 1993 or was it 92.

You need to upgrade your RAM to at least 32 megs. you should be able to
find 32 to 64 megs of RAM for your 486 for anywhere from 10 to 30 dollars
on EBAY.

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