To start with the system I have is a DX4/100 Olivetti PC with 604Mb HD, CDROM, 1Mb trident VESA SVGA graphics card, 12Mb RAM and an old Aztec sound card. As far as the operating system goes when I first bought the computer it had Windows 95 on it, since then I have put Windows 98 on it.

Hang on, you're saying how can you run Windows 98 on a system so low as mine, well I'm here to tell you that it runs quite nicely. OK when windows 95 was on here it was running very happily except, as most of you out there know, Windows 95 especially on a 486 has a tendancy to need reinstallation quite often. This after a while got very annoying so a friend of mine said one day when I was about to do another reinstall, 'Why don't you try Windows 98 for a laugh'. 'Yeah', I thought, 'Why not?'. So I did.

So, with it installed and after the last reboot, I got stuck in to see just how well it was running. To my surprise I found that it ran fine, everything worked as it should, it didn't lock up when ever I tryed doing anything major, like cleaning out the registry. So I thought, 'Great, it works', which pleased me as I like the look of Windows 98 and it also proved one thing that I have always thought, which is:- never underestimate the power of the old 486, especially the DX4/100.

All that said, there is one small little problem but it is so small that, to me, I can put up with it as long as my computer runs better which is that Windows 98 loads a little slower than W95. This slowness is probably in part a little to do with the fact that I'm running W98 on 12 meg of memory, which is a bit low. But, at the end of the day, it works and this slow down is in the order of booting up takes about a minute longer. Also, when you open new windows or folders, it takes about twice as long. An extra two seconds, I can live with that!

Another thing with W98 is it has better drivers than W95 and is also better at installing the right drivers. So now, with W98 my system, the PC runs better. One example of this is when I had W95 on here for the graphics card the best driver it had was a VESA SVGA driver which was OK-ish. When I installed W98 it had a driver for a Trident 9440 graphics card which is exactly what is in my system. With it installed I now get 16 bit colours, which I never had on W95. I even have 32 bit colour if I want with all the same screen resolutions as before.

So with W98 making the system run better it means that a lot of the software that comes out these days will run on my system quite happily. In fact, without the system being overclocked, it will run anything up to P100-needing software (as long as it doesn't need a 3D graphics card, more than 1 meg graphics and 12 meg RAM memory). But then, saying that, a 3D graphics card can be added. Yes, although the system is nearly 5 years old, it does have 2 PCI slots as well as 2 ISA slots. A new graphics card could be added and the memory could still be upped,.

So all this said, to sum up here - What do I think of running a 486 with todays software.

First of with W98 as long as you don't mind a ferrari with a mini engine in it, well maybe not quite a mini engine but you get what I mean.

Secondly I have to be a bit choosy on what I can run on my system.

Actually thats it so, after all, I am quite happy with my 486, which is going to be seriously upgraded soon anyway. At the moment though, I am quite happy with my 486. OK, Tomb Raider III wont run on it but since I'm gonna upgrade in the future anyway I will wait till then to get it.

So if anyone says to me that you 'HAVE' to have the latest machine out, I say bollocks to you. I find that a old 486 is quite good for most things these days.

IAN

Since writing this article Ian is installing Linux! Ta mate - good on ya!. Rob / Coagulus