One final obsolete computer part question.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Ok, actually two quick questions. I know I’ve been no-stop with the older computer questions, but it’s kind of my obsession right now. But after this, I’ll post more interesting, non computer related questions. I promise :slight_smile:
Ok, here goes.
I got 4 16meg memory chips for a 486 I have and tried them out. Turns out, it doesn’t take 16meg chips. I have 32 megs of memory, but since I’m running Windows 98, a little more would be nice. So I’m thinking of getting an ems expansion board (I could make a ram drive and use that for Virtual Memory, which would be slower than real memory, but a lot faster than an actual hard drive). There was one selling on e-bay, an Intel Above Board, and it even had Windows 95 drivers for it. I asked the seller if there were Windows 98 drivers, but apparently there arn’t, so I didn’t buy it. I checked Intel’s web site and the drivers only went up to Windows 95. The seller told me he tried the card under Windows 98 but it gave him an invalid driver error and wouldn’t let him boot.
So my first question is, if I buy a card from somewhere like eBay could I just use DOS drivers? I mean, you can load them into memory in Config.sys and/or Autoexec.bat and usually Windows doesn’t have any problems with them. So that could work right?
Second, I recently saw a card on eBay (http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1291916957) , here’s the description:

Micro Industries 12 MB RAM card completely filled with (12) 30-Pin memory simms. Pops into an ISA slot of older AT through 486 computers. Tested and guaranteed to work. Some older computers had memory limitations or are hard to upgrade; simms no longer available or expensive, etc.

I wrote the seller and asked if it came with a manual or drivers. The reply I got is that it doesn’t come with a manual, and it doesn’t need any drivers.
That can’t be right, can it? I tried looking up Micro Industries web site but can’t seem to find anything about the card (this isn’t surprising since the card has to be pretty old by now). Anyway, I’m wondering if there are drivers that the seller doesn’t know about, or is it possible that it could run without drivers? I don’t think so, but I could be wrong. I asked what kind of couputer it was last used on, and the operating system. I was told it was last used on a 386SX using Windows 3.11

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brain…melting…must

get…away…

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Both of those cards plug into the ISA bus, which means that it’s likely that both will need drivers. If I were you, I’d either spend a few bucks (you can probably get a pentium motherboard with a p-100 processor for under 50 bucks at a secondhand computer shop–it will be able to support more ram,) or look for a “ram doubler” type board–they plug into the simm slots themselves, which means that they usually dont need drivers.

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Thanks, but I already have a Pentium, and I WANT to keep the other computer a 486. I have a SimmExpander which lets you plug in 4 simms into it, then plug it into a memory slot, but two problems. First, I have two banks of four slots, and I’d have to have four or eight SimmExpanders, but there’s only room for two side by side. Second, if 16 meg chips won’t work, I seriously doubt that, if I could, filling 8 SimmExpanders with four 4meg chips to make a 16meg chip will work because 4megs per simm is probably the limit.
Thanks anyway.

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Boy Joel you’ve kicked the wayback machine into full gear.
If you’re running a 486 that maxes at 8 meg SIMMS you really should be running Win 95 for best performance and Win 95 will be perfectly happy with 32 megs of RAM.

Trying to get reasonable performance out of the 486 under Win 98 is the root of your problems.

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I’m not having any problems actually. Everything’s fine. The only reason I want more memory is so that if I run lots of programs I either won’t have to have virtual memory kick in, which can slow down any computer considerably, or I want virtual memory to be on a ram drive so that it’s being written to memory instead of a hard drive.