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OSes and Applications for Aging Machines?
TellarHK asks: "My aunt and uncle, both completely unfamiliar with computers, are looking to replace a broken word processor with something new. They'd like to either spend as few dollars as possible on a computer, or replace the word processor. Silly me, I mentioned I had a spare PC kicking around. It's a Digital Equipment 'Starion 930' Pentium 100 with 40M, and onboard video of an unknown type. As this machine is going to be used for word processing, I need an OS that will work with my newly dusted-off Lexmark Z11 printer. So what are my options? Will QNX handle the limited video and printer? Is there a WYSIWYG solution for FreeDOS? Is there a chance in hell any Linux distribution can give me graphics? I've got a whopping three gig drive in there. What can I do with it?"
See if you can find some old Windows 3.1 disks online (lots of places have old Windows versions available for download). MS Word 6.0 or WordPerfect on Windows 3.1 worked fine on my old 486SX-25, and I imagine it'd work just as well on a Pentium system.
I have an old laptop which I use for a similar purpose: an IBM thinkpad 755, which is a 486/75 with 20mb of RAM, and what is possibly the world's most troublesome video adapter.
Despite these shortcomings, I am still able to run Windows 98 with Word 2000. '98 boots up in about a minute, and word takes about 10 seconds to load. For an 8 year old laptop, that's pretty darn good. The only drawback is that the type is somewat laggy, although the system described in this article should be nearly twice as fast.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Linux will run like a dream on that thing, man. I am running debian w/ graphical environment on AMD K-5 100, 32M, 500M HD.
Loverly.
illegitimii non ingravare
Some people here have good ideas, some are just giving the party line.
I use and setup equiptment like this all the time, I collect older hardware, and also you find this level of equiptment when dumpster diving, found 5 or 6 386 throu 586 mobo's the other night.
There are really two options, the Microsoft solution or the unix solution.
MS Win 3.1(1) will work fine on that hardware, it is generally above spec for the software. I run it on some slower 386 level stuff fine. For a P100 like you have, I'd suggest win95 or win98 with IE stripped out(win98Lite - look it up). I've been able to shoehorn 95 onto a 386 and 98 onto a lowend 486 and they ran ok(little programs that run in the config.sys that lie to programs and say your on a pentium!)
As for WYSIWYG word processing - use a copy of Wordperfect, it was the standard at that time, the MS products were not that great. Wordperfect does not even require win3.1, it can run WYSIWYG in dos. Use DOS 6.2 not 6.22 that was one after they lost a fight and had to remove some stuff.
The unix solutions are also not too bad. BSD or linux will run fine, just get rid of the useless extras, and use a simple window manager, nothing complex. That said, I use enlightenment on a P150 system with a ati mach32 2meg and it runs reasonably well.
QNX is one I have been playing with for a little bit now, like the interface it has, really slick. But it can sometimes be a pain to configure if it did not detect things right. Once you find and understand the manual, things are OK. I don't know of any word processor for it, but I do know there is a wordpad equivalent.
My suggestion after all that: Try the unicies first, they are cheaper and you will know if you like it. If you find usability is low, just dig up a couple of old MS and Novel(wordperfect) disks at a garage sale or something and install. That is what those programs were made for.
On Arrakis: early worm gets the bird. Magister mundi sum!
As an owner of a old DEC i know the machine came with Win95. why don't you just restore then machine to the day you bought the box and be done with it. why pull out your hair with off the wall OS's and the like. what i am trying to say is, don't make your life my difficult than it needs to be. GOOD LUCK
Hardware Requirements
* Minimum 386 IBM compatible computer or better
* 640k minimum RAM (2-4Mb or more recommended)
* 15Mb free hard disk space
* EGA, VGA, Super VGA
* Mouse (optional/recommended)
There are a lot of light apps one can run. I had a similar setup up until not so long ago. These are the apps that I found ran nicely on that hardware.
[Science] is one of the very few things that raises human life a little above farce and gives it the grace of tragedy.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6169