Date: Sun, 06 Feb 2000 14:57:21 -700
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: IBM PS\1 & N-T 1.11.2X
Hello everyone!
Some weeks ago, a friend of mine offered to give me -- or throw away --
his old IBM PS\1 computer system. Of course, I hate to see anything
worthwhile thrown into the garbage, so I thought I'd at least look at
the machine and see if it could be salvaged and given to someone else.
Well, to make the long story shorter, this PS\1 was in *near mint*
condition (due to very little use), and I quickly fell in love with it.
And it was a good excuse to try out the smaller, XT/286 version of
Net-Tamer, V1.11.2X.
At the moment, I've been using Net-Tamer's 386 V1.11.2 on a 486 DX2
that runs at 50 MHZ with a 14.4 kbps modem -- and it runs very nicely
on that machine, I might add. The PS\1 is a 286 running at only 10 MHZ
with a modem operating at a mere 2400 bps maximum. Not only did
Net-Tamer install very well on this system, but it operated flawlessly
with uploading and downloading e-mail and could do an acceptable job
at browsing in text mode, downloading an occasional graphic, and even
performing Internet searches (I recommend http://dmoz.org as a starting
point with this level of resources). Of course, I didn't expect
lightning speed with this modem, but when you think about it, most of
us don't read at lightning speed anyway -- and unless you are limited
by the expense of metered online Internet time, it doesn't make any
difference whatsoever if you need 1 or 10 minutes to download the same
quantity of e-mail that takes you 30 or more minutes to read and much
more time to write!
So I wanted to let those of the list know that Net-Tamer can service
basic e-mail speeds with very limited resources -- just as advertised --
and often with what other folks consider outdated and useless trash.
This IBM PS\1 has only a 30MB HDD, one 1.44MB FDD, *1* MB of RAM (which
consists of 640k conventional memory and a 384k extended memory cache
used by Smartdrv.exe under PC DOS 7), and a color VGA monitor. I'm
surprised to see that it actually *gains* about 13 seconds per week (the
internal battery must still have a lot of life after these ten years),
and in some cases, its programs run at least at fast, if not faster,
than its 486 big sister. I suppose it all depends how well you configure
your system. <g> After tweaking this and that in the boot up files, I
have about 589k of conventional memory. After installing PC DOS 7 and
all the programs I could use with it, I still have about 17.5 MBs of
space free on the hard drive.
This PS\1 originally had PC DOS 4.01 on it and has a small amount of
this DOS permanently included within a ROM chip. Since I didn't care
for the old "quad system" software or to boot up into it (this con-
sisted of version 2.0 of Microsoft Works, Prodigy, an online reference,
and access to DOS), I installed PC DOS 7 with the y2k update along with
the option to disable the ROM chip access. Interestingly, this
machine was already y2k ready anyway before adding PC DOS 7 -- even
with a BIOS dating back to 12/01/89!
Motto: Thanks to Net-Tamer, one man's trash can be another's cash!
C:\>_______j_e_r_r_y__j__h_a_u_m_b_e_r_g_e_r_______ **another*happy**
#:/>_an_advocate_of_sensible_CLI_operating_systems_ **WordStar*user**
-*- You think somebody's too short? No, just vertically challenged!
Net-Tamer V 1.11.2X - Registered
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