Thinkpads Forum

I am looking for an old (but perfectly functional) desktop computer with a Pentium I or Pentium-MMX processor, at least 256MB of RAM, and USB ports. I am not sure if such a machine even exists, but if you have one for sale or if you know which models have such specs, please let me know. I'm aware of an HP Vectra model that supports up to 192MB (6x32MB) EDO RAM, but I hope to have more than that.

Thanks!

Why do you want 256mb of ram on a pentium my family had one with 32mb for the longest time (10 years), and it worked fine, fast eneough for 95 then 98. Then I upgraded to 96mb with dimms I found in the dump at our cottage, and it worked even better with windows 2000 for another year (at which point we were given a p3 450).

craigmontHunter wrote:Why do you want 256mb of ram on a pentium

I am looking for a machine to replace the Packard Bell in my signature, which currently has a 100MHz Pentium CPU underclocked to 90MHz so that a stupid DOS game that I play doesn't get too fast -- its speed is determined by the processor's speed. This machine has two limitations: first, it has no USB ports and for some reason it can't support USB PCI cards, and second, its RAM only goes up to 128MB. I want an upgrade that'll still be slow enough for this game, but has USB and a lot more RAM, ideally 256MB or more so that I can run Windows XP and Office 2003. Don't laugh, even my current Packard Bell sort of runs XP, but just a tad too slow. I can't increase the CPU speed (because of that game), but having 256MB RAM would be good for WinXP.

Fair eneough, I never though about that. If the processor speed is directly related, you may have a tough time balancing between speed for xp and the game getting too fast. Good luck, I will be at the cottage at some point and see what I can find at the dump for you

What about a Compaq Armada 7400 laptop, 400MHz CPU, 256MB RAM, 6GB HD, 14" XGA?
I think it uses speedstep, so you might be able to underclock.
If interested, you could have it cheap (like $75.- shipped)

The slowest PC I still have has Intel Pentium III / 550 MHz (Katmai), way too fast I guess.

Im on vacation
But I have an Full AT Tyan MoBo
Runs PI's with the old style memory
Also have a Gateway Baby ATX that ECC memory

Ill give you either, heck Ill give you both for $25.00 shipped
Keep in mind, Im on vacation for another week, so it wont be fast

Ron

I would forget XP altogether and run W2K. That OS is far more adequate on older hardware with less RAM and since the XP kernel is mostly compatible, you should be able to run most of XP programs. My parents were running W2K on their old A22m up until a few months ago when I finally upgraded the to a T42. Pretty much all XP programs worked or had equivalents.

I do have an old P1 mobo with chip somewhere, was going to make a Linux firewall out of it but never got around to it. Have no clue how much RAM it can take though. Feel free to PM me, I can take a look at it. It's an ATX board so probably has at least 1 USB port.

But if you absolutely must have your specs, try to locate an old AMD K5 or K6 board. Earlier ones used the same socket as P1 so should be compatible and since they were made later, some *may* be capable of handling 256MB.

craigmontHunter, jronald and synchromesh, thanks in advance for digging out your old mobos/computers on my behalf. Keep in mind, however, that I do require 256MB of RAM or more. There's a pretty good chance that a colleague of mine is giving me an HP Vectra with 192MB for free, so I would be reluctant to pay for something that doesn't have more than 192MB.

synchromesh wrote:I would forget XP altogether and run W2K. That OS is far more adequate on older hardware with less RAM and since the XP kernel is mostly compatible, you should be able to run most of XP programs.

I agree that Win2K runs much more smoothly on such a dinosaur. In fact, my Packard Bell is using Win2K. But I failed to mention that besides playing silly DOS games, I also want to use this Pentium desktop as a backup of the T42 listed in my signature. This T42 is running Windows XP Pro and has several programs that aren't supported by Win2K, so I prefer to install WinXP on this desktop. Again, I'm well aware that WinXP is slower than Win2K on a 15-year-old machine, but >99% of the time I would just be booting into DOS and playing ancient games. The WinXP installation is just a backup.

synchromesh wrote:But if you absolutely must have your specs, try to locate an old AMD K5 or K6 board. Earlier ones used the same socket as P1 so should be compatible and since they were made later, some *may* be capable of handling 256MB.

Interesting idea -- I should have thought of that. I will start doing some research into the compatibility between the AMD and the Pentium.

A few thoughts,

Most of the early PI mobos maxed out at 64MB RAM. Many of the later ones could only support 128MB. The machine you found that supports 192MB is likely your best bet for a PI as I've never seen one support as much let alone more.

I've gotten rid of most of my old parts but I will look through what I still have to see if I have anything that may work for you.

Beyond that I agree with syncromesh, the AMD K5/K6 should fit the bill for you.

Another solution (and the one I employee) is to have a dedicated DOS box. I run multiple XP machines and an old PI-100 w/ 64MB RAM on a 4 port KVM switch. No compromises on XP and DOS runs as it should.

Good luck with this

According to this page you need to find a mobo with 430TX chipset. My board has a 430VX chipset listed there with maximum of 128MB RAM. It's possible they're off as sometimes official limitations are incorrect. Feel free to do some research on this, I couldn't find much it being so old.

I checked the board for you. It has 3 ISA and 3 PCI slots, socket 7 processor, pipeline burst cache (module included), built-in ATI videocard and Sound Blaster as well as 2xUSB. It's an ATX board made in 1997 and it supports 2 SDRAM chips! Must be one of the very last P1 boards. There aren't any markings but according to some numbers I punched into google, it's an Intel board. Let me know if you want it. I can throw in some freebies like a P1 processor with passive heatsink and a mighty 1GB hard disk.

Big_D wrote:Another solution (and the one I employee) is to have a dedicated DOS box. I run multiple XP machines and an old PI-100 w/ 64MB RAM on a 4 port KVM switch. No compromises on XP and DOS runs as it should.

That was also my solution for about three years, during which I had an eMachines desktop (1.1GHz PIII, 512MB RAM) serving as the backup WinXP machine, while the Packard Bell was dedicated to DOS programs. But what I didn't like about that arrangement was that the eMachines was virtually never used (as expected for a backup unit). So, I came up with the idea of using the Packard Bell for both DOS games and WinXP backup, and that's when I realized that its lack of USB is a problem, and that more RAM would help. As a result, I started this "LF" thread.

synchromesh wrote:I checked the board for you. It has 3 ISA and 3 PCI slots, socket 7 processor, pipeline burst cache (module included), built-in ATI videocard and Sound Blaster as well as 2xUSB. It's an ATX board made in 1997 and it supports 2 SDRAM chips!

Excellent! This sounds like the winner! However, you've just reminded me that the same colleague mentioned earlier (the one who's going to give me the HP Vectra) also has an old Dell Optiplex, which I'm almost certain has the same type of mobo as yours. He might be willing to give this Dell to me as well, but if not, I will definitely contact you regarding your SDRAM socket 7 mobo. Do you ever go to Boston or Cambridge? If you do, I could probably pick it up from you in person.

UPDATE: I vaguely recall that his Dell is an Optiplex Gn+. If confirmed, then it uses the Intel 430TX chipset!

One thing that you may or may not care about is that some of those older chipsets (Intel 430TX in particular) only had a cacheable address range of 64MB in the onboard L2 cache. This did lead to noticeable drops in performance in Windows. The Intel 430HX was able to include up to 512MB or RAM in its cacheable range but only with EDO or FPM RAM.

A board with the VIA MVP3 chipset and 2MB of L2 cache (e.g. FIC PA-2013) would be able to cache 256 MB of RAM in write-back mode...

Excellent thread/info on older boards.....ahh...I remember them well....

I have a similar app....an older DOS machine-tool control program...that I'm looking for hardware for, and am about to post a WTB thread about....which is why I clicked into this thread.

PW; as you may know, I'm a nut about win2k....love it....STILL running it daily (right now) on my own main-machine T60p.

But I wouldn't say it likes 256mb much. Not if you're doing anything on it anyway. I used an HP6000 laptop for years, that must've had a mainboard-glitch because it'd never run stably with a pair of 256 sticks in it.....so I always used it with a pair of 128's.

And win2k would fairly often go into 'grind' mode....where it was swapping huge chunks of VM to/from HD. If I was careful to never open more than X windows/tabs in Firefox it'd be ok, but....

Which is why I kept trying to run 512mb in the POS...

Anyway, if you're actually going to USE the machine, i.e. run a lot of programs or windows open, you may have a problem even with win2k on just 256mb.

VIA Chipsets; there were problems with those. I don't recall the exact glitch, but I do remember tearing our hair out back when we were using a lot of VIA/K6 mainboards on the CNC machine tool controllers. It was something odd/incompatible in the chipset itself. We were never able to get a solution from VIA.....apparently not something fixable with a new BIOS....so we ended up dumping them and using a board with a different chipset.

Speed: there were several utilities available back then to deal with the exact problem you have with your game......i.e., to adjust a newer cpu to run at a slower rate for an old game. I'd check into that. They probably won't work right on CPU's newer than X....but they may well work on P2, or even P3 cpu.

Also, have you looked into "DOSbox" ?

I don't know what the true 'website' or 'homepage' for it is, but start here....

http://vogons.zetafleet.com/index.php?c=7

I've used this successfully to run an old DOS PCB-CAD application (pcad4.55) on win2k on my T60p...lol... I needed to get some mfg-files for a very old design, and the only way to get the files was to have pcad generate them....so I had to RUN the program, not just copy from the old directories.

Dosbox managed it; which was a pretty neat trick, since it also had to successfully run the 3rd-party 'dongle elimination' utility.

Anyway, I never checked into any 'speed control' aspect of Dosbox, since I didn't need such a thing, but it does have a very active developer/user community...worth checking into....maybe you could even run your games on your main Thinkpad, and not get any real work done at ALL...

Richard

pianowizard wrote:Excellent! This sounds like the winner! However, you've just reminded me that the same colleague mentioned earlier (the one who's going to give me the HP Vectra) also has an old Dell Optiplex, which I'm almost certain has the same type of mobo as yours. He might be willing to give this Dell to me as well, but if not, I will definitely contact you regarding your SDRAM socket 7 mobo. Do you ever go to Boston or Cambridge? If you do, I could probably pick it up from you in person.

UPDATE: I vaguely recall that his Dell is an Optiplex Gn+. If confirmed, then it uses the Intel 430TX chipset!

I do go to Boston (Brookline, actually) on weekends and sometimes during the weekdays so we can definitely meet around there. I even have some 128MB SDRAM chips sitting around, can throw those in for $5 apiece. Let me know.

Would a virtual machine work ?

E.g VirtualBox from Sun

I have an older Socket7 (actually Super Socket7) board, don't remember the chipset, currently running an AMD-K6 II CPU @500MHz, with 256MB (128x2) RAM. This same board would also support an Intel Pentium / Cyrix 6x86 CPU).

The machine in question has been working since 2000, but the board has been replaced once after it failed (about 3 years into the life cycle). It has an 80GB Hitachi-IBM hard drive and is running Windows 98 SE. I do use it to run some old DOS games, but in general, I think that DOSbox is good enough, and should allow you to tweak the speed settings to match any old game, which is better than trying to keep these ancient legacy systems alive forcefully. As long as it works, I'm happy, once it stops, I will probably let it go.

An update. I found a newer version of that DOS game whose speed is not tied to the CPU's speed, and a friend just gave me a 933MHz PIII Gateway desktop (with 80GB HDD, 512MB RAM, and, of course, USB). It runs Windows XP Pro well and will do what I need perfectly. So, I will be upgrading my 15-year-old Packard Bell to this Gateway, and am no longer looking for a Pentium desktop with 256MB RAM etc. But thanks everyone for your help and interesting discussion.