Minimum hardware requirements (Was: Old, but not "Classic"

From: Allison J Parent <allisonp_at_world.std.com>
Date: Sat Nov 14 15:15:07 1998

< Very rarely you see a cached 386sx boards. I have once or twice,

Cached SX is an oxymoron. They are cheap and handy. Often speed is
not a requirement, just being able to is enough more often than not.

< But 386sx still have no HP oomph even running netscape 3.x is like
< watching the frozen molsses flow even with 10MB ram.

It's not that bad unless you used to PII/300 as your standard. Watching
3.0 run on a 8088/4.77 with a st225...that's slow!

< > Acrobat, runs on any 386 and maybe lower. Unfortunatly it's so damm b
< > and slow that it's painful even on high end 486s!
<
< No no... is there other programs that can read the PDF besides
< Adobe's? That's the key.

I've used Ghostscript for that but that's bulky as Acrobat too and slower.

< Hey, I was able to find bunches of 486 w/o cpu but has cache
< chips boards and many all in one for 386dx or 486 at 5 CDN each.

Cheap is better even 486sx beats a 386dx for the same clock as the 486sx
still has a small (4 or 8k) internal cache.

< > Gads no. I have a 386sx/16 (intel inboard PC) that can march circles
< > around any 286. That has to be the most handicapped 386 around.
<
< May not be good comparsion because many low end boards often have
< no cache. That board of yours must have cache which "breaks" out of
< that group to between 20 to 25mhz range uncached. Can you find any
< cache on yours?

The 386inboard PC does not have cache. It's designed to replace the
8088 in an XT.

< True...but I don't want to wear out those drives from all that
< seeking, used ram is cheap, try to pile up on that one much as you
< can afford. Ram is faster than any drives by long run.

DRAM is not cheap. Around here 30pin simms stack up like this 256kx9
free to $1.00 each, 1mx9 $1-3$, 4mx9 $10-15 (if you can find them). It's
a local thing. I can get 32mb 72 pin simms for less than the equivalent
in 30 pin simms.

I do use the seperate swap disk on most of my systems even VAXen as heads
take time to move and if the disk is even 50% full the travel time from
the current spot to the swap area can be pretty long. A swap drive can
be smaller and if it's one that has a lot of heads switching heads is
faster than moving them so it's cheap speed even where there is a lot of
ram. It can also buy disk space on the main drive. I used to use a
486dx2/50 with a 528mb disk some of the graphic stuff (CADD) needed big
swap space to make up for only 8mb of ram so the swap space ate 24mb of an
already cramped disk. Putting in a small 60mb drive as D: solved
several problems and also allowed me to put a infrequently used temp
directory there.

I've been one to squeeze older hardware for their best performance and
generally I do get a better system often more stable than the previous
owner would believe.


Allison
Received on Sat Nov 14 1998 - 15:15:07 GMT