Always glad to hear from someone with similar tastes. I’ve actually replaced my Win98 install with a Linux one, for now, just to try out. But I agree with you that it is still a valid option on many systems, and I myself will definitely use it in the future … I can’t help tinkering with these things. I also love looking for Open Source and freeware alternatives to various software. It’s a fun little hobby with useful results in the end.

For slow systems running older Windows Operating Systems, I’ve always found this site to be very use to find mini-sized, low resource requirement programmes:
http://www.tinyapps.org

Have a look, I’m sure you’ll find some useful gems. That’s all from me at the moment. Do drop by sometimes, it’s always fun to exchange computer war stories.

Samir

Thank you for pointing me to PC-BSD. Seems like an interesting project which I will definitely explore further. I have tried Ubuntu before but it doesn’t even manage to boot into X on most of what I would consider old hardware. As you rightly point out, that situation is getting worse with every new version.

The solution I finally used on my old computer was Arch Linux. It is not the easiest system to set up, but because of its bare-bones take on system installation, and using extremely light GUIs like OpenBox, it is possible to set up a very functional and satisfactory system on any hardware you have to work with. I am currently running it on a Pentium 4 with 128 Mb of RAM, but I have no doubt it can be adjusted well enough for my even older Pentium 3 with 64 Mb of RAM.

Obviously, choice of software plays a large role here. So, Open Office is out and simpler text editors or AbiWord is in, etc. But that is a workable compromise to continue using old hardware for daily requirements, I think.

Thanks again for your input,

Samir

I work as system admin. There are many kind of OS in here. If I want to go fast using linux I will prefer pcbsd, but it still require 256MB memory to install.

There is some user here have been forced to use ubuntu which still use 6.06 because it is much faster then 7.10 or even 8.04. Even then loading 1MB excel file using Open office 2.4.1 will still require a couple of minutes on 128 Memory. And when they have opened some 3 MB file, they have to save and close it half hour before office hour ended, or they might loose data if they force kill openoffice………..

Thanks for dropping by. I’ll try my best to help. Please excuse me if you already know some of this, but since you requested the non-geek treatment I figured it was best to go to the very basics.

Computers connected to the internet are like an office with a phoneline having many extensions. Different people in the office can be contacted on different extensions, and if one of these extensions is cut or not working for some reason, you can’t contact that person directly. Similarly, in a computer, different types of software use different numerical ports to connect to the internet. Your web browser, for example, will usually connect through port 80.

Limewire and Kazaa use different ports to connect to the network. A firewall is a piece of software that could be on your computer or on the computers of your internet service provider. It blocks certain ports for security reasons, or in some cases to prevent the use of software that use those ports. From what you describe that seems to be your problem.

If you have firewall software on your own computer you should be able to tell it to allow Kazaa or Limewire to connect. By default Win98SE doesn’t come installed with firewall software, but your virus checker or similar security system could have the same functionality. If the blocking is being done by an external computer, there might be ways to bypass the restriction.

Since Limewire seems to be your primary concern, I would look here:
http://wiki.limewire.org/index.php?title=User_Cant_Connect
It is a fairly comprehensive walk through of how you could solve the problem. I’m sure similar instructions exist for Kazaa, but the principle is the same.

Have a look at that. If it doesn’t work or you need any further pointers, drop me a message using my contact page and we can try to figure it out.

Hope this helps,

Samir