Late night hacking

I’ve not done this in ages Sat, in pieces, in my office is a Compaq 486 all-in-one PC that Amy has given to me. It came preloaded with Windows 3.11 and contains a network card. My aim was simple - get it on the network, then see if it would go on the Internet.

Getting it on the network was easy, all I had to do was install the Windows 3.11 TCP/IP update and configure it. The machine popped up on my network and managed to install Netscape 4.0 off my Linux server. It had no idea what to make of the long filenames, but coped very well.

I ran out of disk space, the tiny 100meg HDD only having 7 meg free. So out it went and in its place went a 256MB CF card in a CF-to-IDE converter. Some farting around with fdisk and xcopy gave me a neat clone of the original HDD that booted.

Netscape didn’t run too well on the weedy 486SX/25 CPU and with only 4 meg of ram it was constantly swapping to the disk. Fortunately I had 8 meg of ram in another old PC so in that went, bringing the machine up to 20 meg of ram and instantly the disk swapping stopped. But it was still quite slow overall, so out of the old 486 came its DX2/66 CPU.

And here’s the current state of things. The CPU is designed for a ZIF socket because DX2/66s need heatsinks and fans to keep them cool. Originally I got around this issue by supergluing the heatsink and fan to the top of the CPU. This worked, but the superglue has gone brittle and the heatsink fell off. My next plan is to somehow attach a Pentium MMX class CPU cooler and heatsink to the processor, probably using cable ties and luck.

It’s fun though, and it’s been ages since I sat up for half the night fiddling with a PC.

Tags: 486, blog365, Compaq, cpu, hard disk, Hardware, pentium, retro, Windows