100mhz system

D

Darakian

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Apr 12, 2004
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Hey I just got an old 100mhz system that I dug out of my garage and was wondering what type of OS could run on it, preferably with a GUI, any linux distro would be good as I dont want to spend any money at all on this thing.
 
Darakian said:
any linux distro would be good.
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you kinda answered your own question. although, you could most likely install any of the win9X operating systems and possibly even win2k if you have enough ram. iirc, the minumum specs for win2k are 133mhz and 64mb ram. it would probably not run too much different on 100mhz than 133mhz.
 
dont expect to run kde or gnome on that, if you use X at all use a minimalistic window manager.
 
As long as thats a pentium class 100MHz system and not a 486, it will be good with a minimal install of linux, or you could use 98lite if you want the windows route. It mainly depends on the amount of ram in the system.

An old distro of linux would work well with it if you want to give up some modern features. I remember linux used to fly on my 486dx4 100 w/ 16MB ram way back in the days with slackware 3.0
 
at that speed, the big concern is the ammount of memory it had...


there were a lot of machines that speed that only had 8 or 16MB of RAM, which makes things kinda painful.
 
i have an old router thats a 486 dx4 100mhz with 80mb of ram. i modded an old powersupply so that it has no fan and only has powerconnectors for the board and floppy drive. completely silent and with the exception of the initial bootup and floppy load, its solid state :D
 
I dont know how much ram is on it right now but it has 4 simm slots which are all full and the processor is an AMD x5 or somthing like that, I know its an AMD chip but the model im not sure on.
 
i dont think DOS and win 3.1 would be a good idea i think he sbetter off with the win 9x series much better GUI not to mention mro eupdated programs can be run on them rather than 3.1
 
What the hell is he going to do with it though? Win95 on a 100MHz system might have been acceptable 9 years ago, but compared to todays systems it will be almost unbearable. Though like others have said, a lot of it depends on the amount of ram in the computer.
 
This is by no means going to be a main system for me, I might use it for web surfing, word processing and mayve a DC program.
 
In that case win3.1 wouldn't be a very good choice. There isn't much modern stuff you can do on it.
 
Darakian said:
I dont know how much ram is on it right now but it has 4 simm slots which are all full and the processor is an AMD x5 or somthing like that, I know its an AMD chip but the model im not sure on.
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Probally a 5x86(which is an 'enchanced' 486) or a K5. It would be ok for some browsing with win95 or a lite linux window manager.

Worse case senerio is it has 16MB ram, are the simms paired together or do they all look random?
 
Ya I looked its an 5x86 and it has 16megs of ram, I might have some other simm sticks lieing around but im not sure on there capacity. So are there any good linux's to run on 100mhz and 16meg of ram?
 
That Am5x86 is one of AMD's 486-based designs that AMD had put out through "reverse engineering". Heck, it was very comparable to (and pin-compatible with) Intel's 80486DX4 processor.

With that 100MHz processor, the front-side bus runs at a molasses-slow (by today's standards) 25MHz. (133MHz 486DX4-class CPUs ran on a 33MHz FSB.) Therefore, Windows 98 will barely run at all on that system with that processor.
 
E4g1e said:
That Am5x86 is one of AMD's 486-based designs that AMD had put out through "reverse engineering". Heck, it was very comparable to (and pin-compatible with) Intel's 80486DX4 processor.

With that 100MHz processor, the front-side bus runs at a molasses-slow (by today's standards) 25MHz. (133MHz 486DX4-class CPUs ran on a 33MHz FSB.) Therefore, Windows 98 will barely run at all on that system with that processor.
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Actually the DX4 100 is 3x33MHz bus. It was called DX4 instead of DX3 because of copyright issues. The AMD 5x86 133 ran at 4 x 33MHz, and could be overclocked to 3x50MHz or 4x40MHz. I remember this because that is when I started overclocking.
 
sandmanx said:
Actually the DX4 100 is 3x33MHz bus. It was called DX4 instead of DX3 because of copyright issues.
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I stand corrected.

However, the 100MHz Am5x86 actually ran on a 4x25MHz bus.
 
Yeah, the DOOM series would run fairly well on that as well as the original wolfenstein. Some others that come to mind are commander keen, the original warcraft, command and conquer, etc.

Or you could run OS/2 so you can say you have..

Riley
 
Windows 95 was running on machines at that speed back in the day... with 16 megs too! So anything else is just bunk.

Hell Warcraft II or Quake will run fine on that.
 
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