Hi, i am new to this forum and have a question which i think is already answered but will toss it out to you guys, here goes: my father has an old compaq pentium 90mhz running windows 3.1 with about 8 megs of ram.. i have cable internet with win98 and amd 450, yes sounds like i am a dinosaur right? well 98 is still working good for me so not upgrading it yet..ok here is my question.. i want to network my fathers machine to use as a 2nd computer and need advice on a functional web browser with win3.1 that wont give me alot of 'need frames' or java messages..will IE 5 take forever to load and use up all my ram or should i look for opera or something less resource consuming? Also, any recommendation on a network card that works good with win3.1? i have an old soho networking kit which i think may have 3.1 drivers but still open to ideas.. Yes! I'm a geek, just like you.

IE 3.0.3 or Netscape 4.0 (hope I got the versions right) without the dialers work just fine for me. Wfw 3.11 is the easy way and 3.1 will work just swell too. The answers are on Lightspeeds site: http://oldfiles.streamlinetrial.co.uk/lightspeed/main.html and be sure to visit: http://www.oldfiles.streamlinetrial.co.uk/powerload/index.htm Their help had me networked and/or running on cable in less than an hour. Never found a reason to worry about a virus, hijack, or trojan either. Skip

Awesome! Welcome to the club. I'm also new. Heck, I just posted my first message here today. So you want a good browser for Win 3.1? Try some of those older versions of Netscape. They work great! Go with the 4.x series. The only disadvantage, you won't be able to access some of those Java based sights. But believe me, it's not really a big deal. Heck I'm writing this post with Netscape 4.8. I'm tinkering around with different browsers to see which one is the best. So far, I would have to say it's Netscape 7.2, but that is an opinion. Here's a good place to find the older versions of Netscape communicator and navigator. The link is good because I was just there. Just go to http://www.sillydog.org and hit the Netscape Browsers Archive button on the top of the page. Another good site is http://www.oldversion.com. They have a lot of old stuff. As for the networking thing, man I just trashed a bunch of old Ethernet cards. If I only knew. You can find any hardware driver at http://www.driverguide.com I've been there a few times to. Hope everything works out for ya. I got to stop talking so much. Lost my weekend Trout fishing trip to super heavy rains, so I'm stuck at home, not much else to do. Not my best weekend.

If you're going to use Win 3.1, then 2 recommendations: Netscape 3.04 Standard (and turn off javascript, because you'll get tons of errors if you dont). Netscape 4.08 for Windows 3.1 is too heavy for a machine with just 8MB. Opera 3.62 (it's a 30-day demo unless you pay for it). You can also turn off javascript and it doesn't have java built into it. Of the two, Opera is the faster, but if you're going to be connected through broadband, it won't matter much. It also isn't as much a resource-hog as Netscape 3.04. Internet Explore 3.03 is pretty much useless now since few pages render properly with it. 5.0 might be better but would take forever to load with just 8MB of memory (if it loads at all). Also, if you decide on Netscape 3.04, you'll still have a lot of swapfile usage.

With only 8 megs of Ram, Netscape 3.04, definitely..You might not have some very attractive pages at times, and certainly no Javascript, but it does frames, and is stable, and any pages in any newer html format it just shows as best it can without any complaints (which is why some aren't maybe so pretty)..My experience is that it has always been *faster* than Opera too..

You could try using Netscape Navigator 4.08 (browser only) but avoid Communicator 4.08, definitely too heavy for your machine. Netscape 3.04 is often referred to as a good option for low memory systems, and i agree. Still i believe IE 3.03 can be useful and probably the fastest, but the number of pages it will show properly keeps diminishing as the browser gets older. Opera? Yeah, give that a try too. In short i'd say get 2 or 3 browsers. They all have their plus and minuses, but that's a fact of life. All the browsers for Win 3.1 are getting rather old and outdated, so you'll have to make due. All of these are available on my site. HTH. Lightspeed. http://oldfiles.org.uk/lightspeed/main.html http://oldfiles.org.uk/lightspeed/lightspeed95.html