Ship to:

MMCIastro
123 Anytown
Mycity, SC. 12345

next day air is fine if you're paying.

Well, I would get rid of them, but being as that I work for a small computer builder/fixer/ISP company, I can occasionally cannibalize them, and make some decent cash from selling the parts when one of our customers has a stone age machine that they want fixed...

Regards, Daniel.

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Using the vocabulary of the great and wise PDB...........................................................................................

"Drat"

it's said it needs 64Meg, but that's 64M free (not used by OS). It might work with a Linux OS and "maybe" windows, but I wouldn't count on it. NO promises. Wouldn't hurt anything to try. My P3-500 took 7-9 hours/result with optimized application. My Celeron 500 is taking 12 hours/result. Note: P3-500 died and was put to rest.

i've never seen seti use more than about 30 megs, typically between 20-25
so 64 including system useage sounds reasonable (unless it uses a lot, but with only 64mb your not gonna but something hefty on it)

from what i've seen this has caused quite a few discussions because as stated, seti requires 64 meg before it'll do anything, whether the system is using all 64 megs or not, thus excluding many systems that *could* crunch for seti

Martin A. Boegelund Said
The 486 hasn't got a PS/2 mouse port either, so I tried to connect my PS/2 mouse to the 9-pin serial port with a converter attached to my KVM-switch, like I did with the keyboard. That didn't work. Luckily I still had my serial port mouse, so I'm using that instead.

Legend Said:
You could try using a PS/2 to AT convertor for the keyboard. If I remember correctly, 486s use 9 pin serial port mice. Doubt you can buy those anymore.

I got some PS/2 -> serial (i assume they're actualy AT) converters that actually came with a recently bought D-Link KVM switch, not tried them, but i assume that they would work

My 486 system is currently not able to crunch Seti

about 5 months ago I found my ole 486 DX 50 and tried to get it back up and crunching. The problem I ran into was a lack of a keyboard with that big old 1" round connector on it, and NO PS/2 mouse. LOL I trashed it.

I wish you had posted the problem. I believe that I have a couple of the adapters lying around taking up space...

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BOINC WIKI

My 486 system is currently not able to crunch Seti

about 5 months ago I found my ole 486 DX 50 and tried to get it back up and crunching. The problem I ran into was a lack of a keyboard with that big old 1" round connector on it, and NO PS/2 mouse. LOL I trashed it.

I wish you had posted the problem. I believe that I have a couple of the adapters lying around taking up space...

Truth be known I might have one "Somewhere", but when we moved everything got boxed up and not necessarily unboxed, and it just wasn't that important.

thanks though

I believe that your 486 must have 32 MEGs built in with 64 Megs added on many of the older MB's had built in ram with the ability to add more.

No. I've taken the darn thing apart too many times to miss that :-) I had 32MB RAM to start with 2-16MB SDRAM in the first 2 of 4 slots. Last year I bought 2-32MB SDRAM modules to add to the 3rd and 4th memory slot. Oops, didn't work. I finally settled on removing the original SDRAM and put the 64MB in the first two slots. I never could get the 3rd and 4th slots to work. I have no idea who made the motherboard. Still, it reports 96MB and that gets me around the SETI restriction. I can hear it swapping while running SETI, but Predictor doesn't seem to swap much at all.

I'm lucky in that I still have the original keyboard and monitor. I stuck one of my extra serial mice on it. The 486 works fine, just slowly :-)

It's interesting to see comments that range from: "Why would you want to do that? Donate it to a museum." to "Cool, that's great". I don't know how long I'll let it run, but I'm going to get another 32 cobblestones tomorrow after 12 days :-) I guess the engineer in some of us (or is that pack rat) is always seeking a use for old stuff.

[ I guess the engineer in some of us (or is that pack rat) is always seeking a use for old stuff.

Murphy's Law #172 pertaining to old computer equipment and parts:

"If you throw it away on Monday, you will discover an urgent need for it on Wednesday"

"If you throw it away on Monday, you will discover an urgent need for it on Wednesday"

What??!! Have you been in my basement? Need any vacuum tubes? I've got a bunch :-)

My 486 system is currently not able to crunch Seti because of too little memory. I have 64MB installed, 61MB free, and when I try to download WU's, I'm told that it's not enough :-(

Perhaps BOINC thinks it's not enough. But what you could do is a test-run of SETI. This is what I'd do:

fetch any SETI@Home client - as BOINC CC from my site worked for you, there are fair chances that also S@H client from my site would. Then I'd follow the instructions about verification of proper functionality. Perhaps you can run the seti command like this:

time ./setiathome-4.07.i686-pc-linux-gnu

to get also wall-clock time spent (this is what could prevent you from participating if CPU time needed is close to 14 days as you have to report result back in 14 wall-clock days). If the difference between wall-clock time and CPU time is more than a couple of percent (up to 10%), then this means your host does a lot of memory-swapping ...

This way you'll get a fair estimation of needed CPU time per WU on your machine.


My first guess, based on BOINC benchmarks and comparing to my slowest machine (P3 @ 1GHz): anything between 11d10h and 15d12h.

BTW, what kind of 486 is it? 486DX2 at 66MHz?

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Metod ...

BTW, what kind of 486 is it? 486DX2 at 66MHz?

It's a 486DX2 80MHz with 256kb cache. I don't remember the processor brand, but I'll open the old bugger one of these days in order to check.

It's been crunching Seti classic some years ago (I actually started my Seti crunching on that very machine) - spent 60+ hours on 1 WU.

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"Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?"

I have a few spare cpu's gathering dust, free to anyone who can use them.

2 Intel P5 (75/100)
1 AMD X5 (133)
2 Intel P-II 400 modules

Ask me about any other old hardware (ISA/VLB/SBUS) needed. I might also have some 486 chips and some quantities of 8/16meg 72-pin ram, and gobs of 30-pin ram about.

Send me mail if interested: techwhizATearthlinkDAWTnet

73 de n4oqk

I have a few spare cpu's gathering dust, free to anyone who can use them.

73 de n4oqk

I figured a fellow ham would have a well stocked "junk" box :-)

73 de WA3VTF

What??!! Have you been in my basement? Need any vacuum tubes? I've got a bunch :-)

Just for fun: I still have a television here without any silicon parts inside. It has a B/W picture tube (no implosion safety on that) and two weeks ago it still worked. Just took about 4 minutes to warm up and give me some picture...

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"If you throw it away on Monday, you will discover an urgent need for it on Wednesday"

What??!! Have you been in my basement? Need any vacuum tubes? I've got a bunch :-)

GlowFETs! Light-Emmitting-Transistors! Cool!

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Here I was going to start advertising some my "Garage Monsters" Hehehehehe

A Genuine Intel - P200 (ASUS MB) running I forget which version of SUSE, I believe 16 meg of RAM... 4 - 4Megs was a bit expensive back then...

It has not been turned on for a few years... But then it was a only a test webserver...

I do have a pile of 1 meg's that I saw and did not have the heart to throw in the trash...

This does not mention some of the 20/40 megabyte drives...

Or a new VLB video card, the drivers require a 5.25 inch disk drive...

Somewhere I have a white box (brand new, never installed) that was my ready spare 286-12... When I find it will take time to encase it in resin and frame it...

Have Fun

R/

Al

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Please consider a Donation to the Seti Project.

Just last year I took an IBM PS/2 Model 60 to the town recyclying center (dump).
It had an 80286 CPU, 20 MB drive & 16 bit MicroChannel cards in it.
A full tower with a folding handle on top, it must have weighed 50 pounds.
I might have the original system disk laying around somewhere.

Where I used to work, they souped these up with a 386 "step-up" processor & ran Windows 3.1 on them.

Here's a good pic of a Model 60, built like a tank & slow as hell:

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This is the voice of world control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied dead. The choice is yours.

how about this, not a relic in a garage/attic, but something i found in a shop a few years ago, not in the back in the "to be blown to hell" pile, but on a "bargin" shelf

a 75MB 3.5" ATA/IDE HDD for £5, think the metal it consisted of would be worth more than that lol

Yeah, the 20 MB IBM drive is full height, probably weighs about 4 pounds. I have one of those in the junk box ... might even be 40 MB if I'm lucky.

And I don't mean to be laughing at the 486 users out there. Until a couple years ago, my dad was using an AMD 486DX4 120MHz. I still wear an old t-shirt around the house that shows that CPU orbiting the earth ... "World's fastest 486 CPU! Around the world with 120 MHz!" It was marketed as competitive with Pentium 75's and 100's.

Also, the P2 200MHz in my kids' room might be due for an upgrade, but the baby AT cases aren't popular anymore. 96MB of RAM seemed excessive at the time. It still can run Win 98 and most kids' games & educational stuff off the CD-ROM.

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This is the voice of world control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied dead. The choice is yours.

BTW, what kind of 486 is it? 486DX2 at 66MHz?

It's a 486DX2 80MHz with 256kb cache. I don't remember the processor brand, but I'll open the old bugger one of these days in order to check.

cat /proc/cpuinfo

(in linux of course) should display pretty much everything about it. Including manufacturer etc.

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Metod ...