I wonder if any of you can help me out. I am trying to put together a computer for a family with a 7 year old daughter, who cannot afford to buy one. They are primarily in need of Internet access and Word for Windows for the girl to use for school work. I have obtained a Gateway 486/33 server that currently has Windows for Workgroups 3.11 with DOS 6.22. It has 638k Conventional Memory (52k used), no upper or reserved, and 7,168k extended (xms) (2,112k used) memory. Total memory is 7,806k (2,164k used). It says that the largest executable program is 586k (same as conventional memory free). Here's where I need your expertise: Can I reformat the hard drive (or delete Workgroups) and load Windows 95, or just install 95 on top of Workgroups (which I didn't think would work)? How about Microsoft Office? Hard drive has not been partioned into multiple drives, nor a mirrored drive. It has a 3 1/2 floppy and a 5 1/4 floppy. Circa 1994 to 1996. It has room to add RAM (16 total slots, 8 being used). I would need to add a modem. The CPU seems to function properly, other than somebody deleted the driver for the CD-ROM unit (need OEMCD001 for OAKCDROM). Would I need to boost the processor speed with one of those chips that straddle the 486? (If it's not too expensive). I am working on a very limited budget (I will be paying for whatever goes into it), but it's for a good cause. If I can get this puppy to the point where they can use it for a year, or so I would be happy. I would appreciate any assistance anyone can give me pointing in the right direction, and letting me know how I should accomplish this.

jack, you can run windows 95 on that computer, but it would be a bit slow, both because of the processor speed, and because it's only 8 megs of RAM. rather than filling up all 16 slots with RAM (which would slow the processor down, having to go thru all those sticks!), see if you can find 2-meg sticks or even 4-meg sticks, instead of the 1-meg ones that you have. if they're the small 30-pin ones, then you may have a difficult time finding 2- or 4-meg ones, as they've been out of production for several years now. as for your CPU, there are lots of 486dx2-66 chips around, twice the speed of your 486dx-33, in which you just replace the one you have with the faster one. check to see how large your harddrive is (at the dos prompt, type "chkdsk", and it will tell you the capacity). windows 95 needs between 55 and 85 megs, depending on the release date, plus some versions came with internet explorer 4.0 (versus 3.0), which takes up another 50 or so megs of harddrive space.

jack I'm no expert, but I've been through this before (for my 12yo daughter). What james says is very valid. You have to weigh up first whether win95 is really worthwhile, because of its memory demands and space requirements, not only for the OS, but also for the programs customarily written for win95. It may well be slow. I chose to stick with wfwg3.11, which runs very well, although it took some effort to get the internet set up, and it's harder to find programs and support because it's obsolete. Programs for win3.1 are normally much smaller than those for win95. If you choose to go for wfwg3.11, drop me a line. If you can't get the software,I have what you need (MS Word6.0, Wordperfect6.0, IE3 for win3.1, from which you can up-grade to IE4 or IE5 from the MS site, Creative Writer, win3.11 installation disks etc), although it might be tricky getting the large files to you and onto your 486. Whatever you do, install as much memory as possible, since memory will be the main "user-noticeable" limitation. Even with a fast modem, the download speed will be poor because of internal hardware issues, not memory. Nevertheless, my daughter has no problems browsing. File downloads are the problem (less than 1Kb per sec). Also, the computer is very likely to be Y2K non-compliant, but this can also be solved. With your configuration, if you choose to solve Y2K rather than put up with wrong dates, you should look for a Y2K solution that's not memory resident. Best of luck. peter

If you need internet explorer 4.01 fro win31 or 311.I can help + show you how or show you a program to use to backup files on the computer you'll useing and restore in on the 486.This program works best with win zip. You download the file you need for the 486 or any older computer.If it's not in win zip form .Zip it up.Then this program called spandisk 11 will split the file and add it to disk.Much like the back up on win 95 & 98. But it can be restored on any windows system with the spandisk 11 installed on both computer.

Thank all of you for your help so far. I'll be trying your suggestions over the weekend. I do have a question on the memory sticks, "Are they only 1 meg each? They have 9 chips on each, and are about 4.25" long and about 1" high". I've seen modem cards with their own chip, so they don't have to use the CPU chip. Any thoughts? Thanks. Jack

jack, the simms (memory) chips you have, are 72-pin modules (not the older 30-pin ones). but if you have 16 slots, i suspect your motherboard is one of the old-old-old 486's, which use parity memory; and parity memory motherboards are fussy! (the reason for the # of slots, is because back then, memory simms were available in 256K, 512K, and 1MEG sizes). this older motherboard, won't take the newer memory chips (non-parity), as i've come across that brick wall several times myself. you can still buy parity memory chips at some computer stores, but they're expensive and hard to come by. if you're going to stick with windows 3.1 or windows 3.11, then 8 megs is enough to get by. as peter said, windows 95 is more of a memory hog. the trick is to optimize your system (autoexec.bat, config.sys, system.ini, etc), in order to get the most out of your memory. if you exit to dos and type "memmaker", it's a program that will optimize your memory for you (it's part of dos 6.22).