What should I do with my 486?

[KennyH]

I need suggestions (beside throwing it away ) on what I can still use my 486 for. The comp will soon be running slackware linux. Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

[BA]

Router, Doom, X-Com, Civilization.

Wonder if it has the balls to emulate NES?

 

[Leo V]

You can run a perfectly good router/firewall on it.

 

[Supafreak]

if ya dont wanna throw it awat u can always blow it up with firecrackers or sumtin !
ya...that could be fun...

 

[KennyH]

Any other suggestions? Other OSes that will run on this thing? It is a 486 dx2 66 with 32 megs of ram, ethernet, and isa video. Thanks guys and gals.

 

[KennyH]

Fire, fire.......hmmm. That would be kind of cool. BA what are those other two things you were talking about besides the firewall? NES emulation? Thanks.

 

[chuckieland]

how about paper weight

 

[BA]

95, DOS, Win3.1(eww)

The other stuff is games
Please tell me you've heard of Doom and Civilization.
X-Com I can probably forgive, but not those two.

I'm actually kind of curious what kind of requirements NES emulators have under Linux and DOS...

EDIT: I spy "isa video." Mr. Monkey Wrench, meet my gaming suggestions

 

[KennyH]

Sorry BA, yes I used to play Doom all the time. I have definately heard of both of them. Thanks for the info. NES emulation.....hmmmmm. Would win95 be ok? Or is that too much for this little 486? How bad was 3.1? Thanks.

 

[BA]

I ran 95 on a 486 w/ 40mb of ram back in the day. It was more than bearable. I'd take 95 over 3.1 any day.

The isa video will be what kills you. It'll be kinda painful unless it's an ass-whuppin' isa card. If there's any way, replace it. If you're stuck with isa video, I'd stay in the command line universe(i.e. DOS and Linux(no X)). That'll limit you to the router or pyrotechnics suggestions.

 

[tontod]

What about getting a klinux boot disk and running rc5?

I think that could work. Its not going to be much, but something.

 

[KennyH]

Nope, only isa on the motherboard and a 535 meg quantum harddrive. It would be ok to browse the internet and do word docs wouldn't it? Thanks.

 

[shawnmos]

Buy an old AMD 5x86 133MHz or a 133MHz overdrive processor from someone cheap and it will run Win95 no problem. You might also be able to overclock it to 150MHz, thats what I did with mine. Also how much ram does it have? 16MB should be the minimum.

 

[GD695372]

Donate it to an irc clan.

I've got more 486 bot comps than most people would know what to do with.(even some stuff running eisa and scsi)

 

[BA]

My memory is a bit rusty, but onboard vid? Sure it's not VLB?

but bah, onboard means it's an OEM, right? So probably no AMD 133 for you Those things crank.

It should work fine for browsing and word. Obviously no videos or anything in your browsing.

Something else, my old beast could almost swing MP3's in mono...

 

[shawnmos]

Word processing and internet should work ok, just don't try to view pages with a lot of javascript or flash. :Q

 

[MichaelD]

LeoV had some nice ideas. Did you guys know that the the Playstation (that would be a PS One, for the Under-21 set ) runs on a 486? YessireeBob, it's true. Before I had my own computer, I thought the Playstation was the schiznit. I even subscribed (oh boy, now that I think about it, my two-year subscription, that I renewed for the second time is STILL hitting my mailbox.) to Playstation Magazine. Not to be confused with Playboy magazine. (Eh, and other toys I couldn't possibly ever afford...God help me if my girlfriend ever saw/heard that! )

It's funny; I hear "486", and in the front of my mind I'm thinking 4,359 years ago. But in reality, it was at least 10 or so years ago. Computers are advancing at such a fast pace, that it's scary. I say "computers" not because I'm ignorant, (hey, I built my own kickass system too!) but because it's a nice "gray area" term that encompasses CPU's, memory, videocards, hard drives, etc.

Sheesh, I cut my teeth on an Apple 2E. Anybody remember those? I "learned Basic". I used to write "programs" that would ask stupid questions, and give stupid answers. Wow, this is trippy! I remember having to name the lines by 10, and the simple commands like "let X = 3" and "if Y >= 5 then 30" and stuff like that. Wow, that was about 15 years ago. The apple (BTW,Apple computers SUCK MOOSE SCHLONG)...G4 my *ss! 2E was about the size of a typewriter (anyone remember those?) and weighed about the same. It had a big-ass dot matrix printer that printed probably 1 page every 76 seconds and sounded like 24 machine guns inside a small reflective room! Ah, those were the days.

Oh yeah, what to do with the 486...you're kidding, right? One word:
Keychain!

 

[BA]

I doubt the PS1 runs a 486. I'd suspect is uses some RISC processor. I know the N64 uses a MIPS chip, and NES is a motorola CPU.

 

[Namuna]

A few options:

- Rape the box for useful components (Floppy drive, Case, power supply, wires, cables), scrap the rest.
- File or Game or Print or Web Server

 

[EvaX]

hehe i would take the CPU out and make a nice keychain...same with the RAM...and if you're a big man...make a larger keychain

 

[neuralfx]

There isnt much to rape a 486 for besides the floppy drive.. the power supply is at and obsolete as well as case.. but if u can get a hold of more 486's .. like im talkin 10-15.. then check out beowulf.org and have a homebrew cluster.. if nothin else youll learn bout parallel computing...
-neural

 

[Dennis Travis]

Since you have 32-Megs RAM I would say go with Win 95. It should run pretty fast. If you do run Linux check as some distributions are optimised to run on a Pentium and may not run very fast on a 486.

 

[ElFenix]

you can get pci 486 boards cheap at computer swap meet/flea market type things. thats what i've got in my 486. had a matrox millenium, a cdrom, and a 350 meg hard drive! woo hoo! ran high sea trader on it for a while. that was fun. "thats a happy crew cap'in"

 

[Muerto]

Firewall, router or paper weight. You pick.

 

[jhu]

turn it into a router. i dit with mine