On Thu, 21 Oct 1999, Mike Cheponis wrote:

> > On Wed, 20 Oct 1999, Brian Stark wrote:
> 
> > I would suggest you try to put another 4Mb of ram in there ......
> 
> 
> I suggest you throw that system into the garbage can and invest a few dollars
> for a nice K6-2/450 or Celeron or something like that.
> 
> My experience here is that a 32 MB 486-dx2/66 w/1G SCSI disk (waaaaaay faster
> than that 386sx) was more than 13x slower than the $178 K6-2/450
> (motherboard/case/ps/chip; ram was around $100 and an 18G 7200 RPM disk
> was $189) that I recently bought.
> 
> This was compiling the GENERIC kernel.
> 
> Unless you plan on using the 386sx as some kind of router or you "just
> want to play" (certainly an OK thing to do!), it's not worth messing
> around with obsolete iron, IMHO.

The only thing I really use the machine for is to telnet into another
NetBSD system (Pentium 166MHz, 128MB RAM, 10GB disk space) via PPP over a
null modem cable when ever that machine's console locks up (which happens
with IP Filter, XFree86 3.3.5, LessTif, WindowMaker, Enlightenment
from time to time).

I agree it is not worth messing around with too much... I don't even want
to spend a dime to put extra memory in the old system. I have thought
about getting a cheap Celeron based system, but I think for now what I
will do is wait until Intel starts shipping the Merced or McKinley
processors (yeah, I know it will still be a while before this
happens). Then, I can buy a new system with one of those processors
as a replacement for my existing Pentium system, and then the existing
Pentium system will become a secondary server with lots of memory and
disk space.

Another option I have thought about is to pull the existing motherboard
out of the 80386sx and replace it with a Celeron based motherboard, but I
have been having trouble finding a board that would fit into the full size
PC-AT style case since all the boards I have seen locally are for the 
mini-tower style cases.

Brian

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