Compaq Personal Question, the OS of choice...

Hello,
Not DIRECTLY Windows 95 related, so moderators move at your leisure.

My dad has two old Compaq Deskpro P166s (identical to the ones in my last post, apart from more RAM).

He wants to use them for designing in his workshop (yes, both of them) using AutoCAD (versions 98 and 2000) and other design software.

We have a domain server here (yes, at home, as we have about 15 pcs!)

As these computers in his workshop are so old, 2000/98 are out of the question (yes, even 98).

For what my dad wants to do (AutoCad, Internet Explorer, Word, Excel, etc), what operating system should be installed? 95 or NT4, baring in mind that we are on a domain here?

Sorry if this is a difficult question. The computers have 160MB of RAM or so, old trio graphics and very small HDDs (from about 2GB to 4GB).

2000 was at first ideal for us until I tried it and it was awfully slow on the machines. The reason it was good is that it supported roaming profiles for my dad, and he uses them on the rest of our 2000-based network for keeping his favourites.

 

Hi quackbal...

Why is Win98 out of the question? At work we have a few process PC's that are P120's, P133's, and 166's running Win98se, Trio 32/64, 850 MB HDD, and 64 MB ram. They are Networked and running SAVCE (Symantec Corp) for Antivirus. Albiet they are a tab slow but they do work.

With the cheap prices of PC's today why not upgrade to a faster PC? You can buy , from DELL Canada, a brand new Pentium 2.4 GHz Celeron for $499 CDN. From DELL USA you can get the same thing for $399 US.

EDIT: Sorry saw you were from UK. The DELL UK site has a 2.8 Celeron for £441.

If you don't want to go brand new you could buy "Offlease" PC's. I, myself, have bought over the last 2 years, a PII 400 (bought for testing) for $100.00 CDN and a couple 21" Sony Trinitron Monitors for around 290.00 CDN from Dell Offlease Canada.

I could not find a DELL Offlease UK site but did find this site for you to compare prices => http://www.data-sys.co.uk/products.php?prod=2&main=2

 

Hi quackbal

...also puzzled as to why W98 is out of the question?

Compaq Prolinea5100 w. 32MB RAM here! - running w98 OK (Kerio v2, eTrust EZ antivirus is the lightest I've found so far)

can even keep up with the real-time waveform window of SoundForge (just about)

Word can be tediously slow. But I can't see that altering much by changing the OS...

Win95 will undoubtedly give you a quicker boot, but it's not as competent at "mending" itself, nor is it as good if you need to "investigate "; but in terms of usage as a "platform" (ie you are just concentrating on running your apps.) it should be fine too, I would have thought...

something I found useful to get the most out of the Compaq: putting the swapfile on a separate HDD using the other ribbon cable works quite well - not sure if it'll be the same with yours, but it works well here. CDROM can be slave on either cable.

best wishes, HJ.

 

Hmmmmmm

Heh,

In that case I may have a look at Win98. One of the machines simply does not function with 98 so I may get a new machine for that.

What do you guys think about NT4? Is it worth all the configuration? After all, it DOES use our roaming profile configuration. Just interested...

I believe 98 doesn't work due to a slight network card problem on one of the machines, might swap it round asap.

Thanks for the help.

 

quackbal

If you do go with 98, do your best to make sure you get 98SE ( 98 Second Addition )

Hardware on and/or drivers for same are the biggest reasons for 98 not working on an OEM ( Compaq ) machine.

It was also the problem why 98SE did not work too well on one of my OLD machines. ( 95 drivers on a 98 OS does not work well ).

BillyBob

 

Hi again quackbal...

A very high percentage of the work PC's I take care of are WinNT 4.0 and for my personal preference I would not run WinNT 4.0 on anything less than a P333 Celeron which just happens to be the lowest CPU that we use for NT 4.0. Anything less than that we use Win98se.

 

thanks

So ultimately... 98SE is the way to go?

 

I would go with the 98Se, it's minimum requirements for speed is 66 MHZ.

 

Thank you all very much.