Guess I just want to do a poll for 486 based or older pc's with 3.1 & dos. Poor ol 3.1 just don't get very many posts anymore.

You can cheat a little with the Pentium 1 machines. I can honestly say I never truly seen a P2 machine sold new with 3.x!
Anything faster than 233mhz/64mb is overkill on dos and 3.x if you ask me.
Nobody seems to brag about the oldies LOL.
So give all the specs!

I'm workin on one for old games etc.

it's a 486 / 100mhz 32mb ram
Not sure yet but thinkin about puttin in an old adaptec SCSI/ISA controller card, 2 gig SCSI HD and RIOCH SCSI CD Burner.

Currently has 650mb hd, generic cd rom.

Have a old Creative CT2980 sound card but i need to find dos & 3.1 drivers.
Anyone have any original floppy images?

Also lookin for a good 3.x compatible video card & driver to get somethin better than 640x480.

Also have a Atlantic by Thomas Conrad 10T NIC. "Any 10/100 isa cards??" compatible with dos & 3.1?

And a good ol HP 690C DeskJet printer, & panasonic color dot matrix."which needs new ribbon"

Also mabey an external usr 56k serial if I can find dos and 3.x drivers.

I also have a 486/66mhz 16mb ram & 800mb hd but I cannot get the scsi sound/cd-rom to work.

Then movin up got a p133/32mb dos machine for experiments. Mabey be changed to damn small linux "dsl" box. I'm in a dsl kick for some reason. So I may up it to 200/64.

Oh yea they all have the big ol 5.25" floppies and 3.5".

I also have a external/serial zip100 drive for movin files.

I play around with them on the old 17" NEC monitor.

Was there ever a scroll mouse back in 3.x or dos? I never remember seeing them till win98.

Have fun but no cheatin!

ASUS A7V8X
AMD XP 2700+ 2.17ghz
768mb ddr 2700
128mb FX 5200
WD 80gb
DVD R/RW

I got an HP Vectra series 4 5/100 that I purchased back in 1996 with DOS 6.22 and Win3.1 on it. It's the original OS that the machine shipped with too. At the time I purchased the PC, I had a choice of Win3.1 or Win95 as the OS. It's a Pentium 100MHz with 16MB RAM. Haven't upgraded the OS at all. I also have a 486 DX2/120 running Win3.1 with 16MB RAM. I use that machine to play the old DOS games like DOOM and Duke Nukem 3D.

My bad, The 486 is actually a DX4/120, not a DX2/120

Hey Chad, you're on the right track, my DOS win 3.11 machines which I still use and have a lot of fun with are my first computer (we're not counting the trs-80 COCO I used since 1987 for bbs'ing) I bought in 1995, a 486 DX4 100 mHz, then later I've added a Packard Bell P-75 and a no name P-120, all DOS and win 3.11, (okay, the p-120 also has linux slackware :)

In answer to some of your specific questions:

Have a old Creative CT2980 sound card but i need to find dos & 3.1 drivers.
Anyone have any original floppy images?

Yes, I like the old soundblaster cards that don't have all the plug and pray crapola, they're easy to setup, go to soundblaster.com and you can get the DOS and win 3.1 drivers, but you'll need to use a fairly new computer with all the latest and greatest to navigate their website to get the files, it's got all the CSS and javajunk, but the drivers are there, read the readme.txt files and you'll be fine. Get it working in DOS first, test it out with a small DOS game, such as what you might get from plbm.com that will fit on a floppy.

Also lookin for a good 3.x compatible video card & driver to get somethin better than 640x480.

You'd want at least a 1 meg VGA/SVGA ISA video card to get at least 256 colors, the 16 colors just won't cut it. I've got a couple of the old trident 8900 cards in a couple of machines. Drivers are easy to find at driversguide.com. Also, be sure to get the (free) univesa.exe file and load it with your autoexec.bat so it properly reports the correct vesa bios version. A better card is something like the 2 mb (or maybe it was 4 mb ??) Diamond Stealth 64, or maybe it's the Diamond Stealth 2000, I've got that in my 486 and I think I've got either TRUCOLOR (64,000 colors) or HICOLOR (16 million colors?), it's very nice also. I believe that the DOS version of DISPLAY DOCTOR is now a free download, you can use that to make sure your card will perform well, then you'll probably want to ditch it and get the correct driver, as I've found display doctor usually eats up too much memory. Grab it at displaydoctor.com I think.....

As for the modem, you need a true HARDWARE modem. You can find them on fleabay fairly easily, juse search for an ISA hardware modem, make sure it has JUMPERS, set it com port 2 and irq 3 and your mouse com 1 irq 4. grab modemdoctor from modemdoctor.com and get the DOS version, and run it, it should detect your modem and do a thorough diagnostics on it, also, you can first try the very small terminal program bananacom which autodetects your modem, or the arachne www browser which can get you on the internet, in DOS right away so you can start grabbing other files you might need. Get it working in DOS, if your modem is okay in DOS, you'll be fine in win 3.1

When you're ready to get on the internet in win 3.11 the easiest way would be with the trumpet dialer for win 3.11, but I prefer the Shiva dialler that comes with IE 3.03. You can grab the whole IE 3.03 'package', or you can get the SHIVA dialer as a standalone, do a google search for a version by glenn galbreath, search for 'wizard57m SHIVA DIALER'

I'd recomend the opera browser, I have version 2.x and 3.62 ???? running just fine on a 386 dx4 40 mhz

Oh and by ALL means, DO get the calmira shell!!!

If I remember correctly, I uploaded a pic of my buddies 386 here:

http://members.mailaka.net/westburian/screen2.jpg

keep us posted!

DOS INTERNET - Close the Windows and keep the internet OPEN

Well I went to soundblaster and picked up both dos and win95 drivers for the sound blaster 16 ISA card.

Still workin on the vid cards. How do ya tell on the old isa cards what size they are? PCI cards I can usually tell by counting chips since there either 256k or 512k per chip.

I have some trident tvga9800's, cirrcus logic cl-gd5429 , gd5420, and an Ati Mach 32 isa/vesa.

I'm sure the external us robotics serial modem is hardware as it works great with linux. Drivers for it are a different story.

I downloaded the SHIVA driver too.

http://browsers.evolt.org/ If you haven't seen or heard of it before you'll definately like it.

I had calmira shell and that's why I wanted a better video driver or card.

ASUS A7V8X
AMD XP 2700+ 2.17ghz
768mb ddr 2700
128mb FX 5200
WD 80gb
DVD R/RW

First, the video card question. My best answer is that most ISA graphic cards come in about three flavors...512Kb, 1Mb and the less common 2Mb. If a 4Mb or better card exists, I just haven't seen one. If anyone here knows of a hotrod ISA video card, please post the manufacturer and model number.

Next, some comments on a 486 running 3.x:

I just bought a box of motherboards, processors and memory on ebay and three of them were 486DX4-100 combos. Two use 72 pin memory but one came with 32Mb of 30 pin memory. A trip to a local computer show last weekend hooked me up with 3 unopened sets of DOS6.22/Wfw3.11 for $4.99 each.

I recall a few years ago when Micron had a 486DX4-100 advertised for the very affordable price of $3,699.99 with a 540Mb hdd, 16Mb 30 pin memory and no monitor. I lost a lot of sleep trying to think of a means to buy that machine when I couldn't afford it.

Hell, I'm tickled to death just to finally own 8 matched 4Mb 30pin SIMM's.

I'll assemble the machine and post back some Wintune 2.0 benchmarks after the holidays.

Skip

486 sx33 laptop with 2mb ram running 6.22/3.11 with norton desktop, slow but stable

I have run 3.11 on a k6/2-500 and that was FAF :)

Woof

Curiosity may have killed the cat but at least the cat wasn`t bored

Man I didn't know anyone still bought old 486's and such. I just trashed 3 486 boards, Still got the cpu's and some ram and other cards and stuff from them. 2 486-66's and a 486-50. Heck I had no use for the 30 pin's so I trashed all but 3 sets of 1mb's couple in those simm adapter things.

Getting ready to part out whatever I can and trash the rest of about 6 pentium boards "3 are p200mhz with 32mb pc66?" and 133's. And part out a couple p2 233/300 boards. All were missing hard drives but I tested them using damn small linux.

May be selling lots of sound cards, video cards, network cards, modems, scsi cards, ram, cd rom's , floppies, etc. on ebay. Nobody want's to buy them around here and shipping with the case and psu makes it to where noone want's to buy them.

Anyone know where I can pick up some anti static bags?

Gonna have to try out that old ati isa/vesa card. it's loaded with all kind of chips. the original card was 512k and really had problems.
Wish more old 486 boards had at least one pci slot, I have a bunch of different old 1-4mb pci video cards. Pentium boards always seem to fast for them old games.

And what's up with all those old 1.2 to 6 gig hard drives being so expensive? I mean local computer shops and ebay can't hardly buy one for less than $20.

ASUS A7V8X
AMD XP 2700+ 2.17ghz
768mb ddr 2700
128mb FX 5200
WD 80gb
DVD R/RW

My First Computer:
AMD Am5x89-P75 @133Mhz.
34Mb. RAM
a little over 2.5Gig HDD
1.4MB. 3.5 (a), 1.2Mb. 5.25 (B)
2 8x cd roms (Sony, Acer)
Soundblaster Pro2 Soundcard
After about 2 monts I switched to Win 95b
Got hit by lightning.

Replaced with Compaq Prolinea Net1/33s
Intel i496sx-33
12Mb. RAM
1.44 Mb. (A)
167Mb. HDD
Creatinvlabs Soundblaster Pro2 (same one)

Replaced with
IBM PC 350
486DX2-66
32MB. RAM
540Mb HDD (c) Little over 2.5 gig. HDD (d) (same as above), 167Mb. HDD (E)(saame as above)
1.44 Mb. 3.5: (A), 1.2Mb. 5.25 (B)
48x cd-rom (F)
Creative Labs SoundBlaster Pro2 (same one again)
Running Win 3.1 from Win95b's DOS and I also use win 95.

Also Had Compaq Deskpro EISA (pieced together)
486 dx-50
20Mb. RAM
2 1.44 3.5" floppies
167Mb. HDD (as above)
Compaq Qvision
Cost brand new: about $3000.00
hard disk controller went out.

Note: I have 3 more that are not 486's (8088, 386sx-16, pentium 60 w/fpu bug)

my first system with 3.1 was a 286 yes a 286 i think it was 4 MHZ with 1 mb ram 20 mb hdd!

it was slow but it done the job took all of 3 mins to boot up!

Thanks

Martyn.S

Just rebuilt one yesterday, for kicks!

AMD 5x86 @ 133 Mhz (TrinityWorks upgrade)
16 Mb 30 pin SIMMs
(more 72 pin FPM SIMMs arriving today)
420 Mb WDD Caviar drive
3Com 3C515-TX 10/100 ISA NIC
Creative SoundBlaster card
Cirrus Logic VLB video
5.25" Floppy
3.5" Floppy

Too bad I threw away a Number 9 4 meg VLB video card a few years back...

You'd be surprised how cheaply you can get 30 & 72 pin SIMMs, as well as 10/100 ISA NICs and unopened 486 upgrade kits on eBay!

That and my local landfill always has plenty of 486s (with one part dying) at its too good to throw away section...

Got distracted here lately. Anyone messed with damn small linux 'dsl'? damnsmalllinux.org

Man it works great on these old 486 and pentium computers. Easy to configure to a external or hardware modem, jumps right on to a network DCHP for internet, has firefox web browser, games, word processor, media player, picture/pdf viewer. Heck it's a live cd and it's also installable. The complete iso is only 49.9 meg. I may have to keep that 650 mb hard drive in there for dsl and try a dual boot with 3.1.

ASUS A7V8X
AMD XP 2700+ 2.17ghz
768mb ddr 2700
128mb FX 5200
WD 80gb
DVD R/RW