I have had a PC given to me. Looks quite old and it is running Win98.
How can I tell the speed of the processor.?
I have looked in START/CONTROL PANEL/SYSTEM but it only tells me what it is, not the speed.
Jim
When you turn the PC `on, and it beeps at you (usually the keyboard lights flash) you should have the chance to press DEL or F2 to go into the BIOS setup - this will usually tell you in there.
Otherwise
IIRC, try right-clicking on the MY Computer icon on the desktop and the Properties and you should see the information towards the bottom under Computer.
Cash
If none of the other responses works, try CPU-Z.
It happens that Cash formulated :
Win98 ???
Put a memtest86 cd in and boot. You'll see the cpu freq and amount of ram right away. You may need to go into bios to tell it to boot from cd before hdd - leave it that way.
In the unlikely event that its a very old 95 era machine heavily upgraded you might need to use a memtest floppy.
NT
I'm running Win98SE and that procedure tells me this: Computer AuthenticAMD AMD Athlon(tm)XP 2500+
224.0MB RAMI dare say there will be some die-hards who reckon such a machine is still useable, but you tend to find anything that has 98 on it originally will really struggle these days as it will be more than 10 years old. Anyone who had beefed a machine of that era up would have upgraded it to XP too if they had any sense, so chances are yours is standard.
Its not just CPUs that have moved on, its the entire machine architecture (memory, disks, USB interfaces, CD/DVD drives, graphics etc.) - and this is reflected in the minimum system requirements for any software you want to run these days.
I've just chucked out an 800Mhz PIII from the Win 98SE era for a friend, (couldn't even give it away though I did manage to flog the XP upgrade pack it had). If your machine had 98 on originally (as opposed to 98 SE) it could even be a PII.
Support for Win 98 was dropped by Microsoft back in 2006 so most new software releases and products don't support it either. Newer USB devices will be a pain too as they won't bother to write drivers for 98SE.
If you do keep it for any reason, throwing some extra s/h RAM at it will help it the most for just a few quid.
PS - I'm not against old machines. I still run a 3.2G P4 with 2G of memory on XP, but even this setup is starting to show its age as software tends to get more obese over time.
Midge.
I don't mind that it is an old machine, 286, 386 or 486 would have suited me better for Ham Radio programming of Philips and Motorola radios as a slow machine is required.
I have just done a search for the motherboard and come up with this:
Very much stil useable. That is what my server is. It does the job without fuss and being a PIII only has a large slow fan in the PSU so is pretty damn quiet. Runs SME Server, a very stable and reliable "out of the box" linux based server/firewall/gateway solution.
Depends what you want to do with the machine, email, news and web doesn't need a octo core 500GHz processor with 6TB of RAM and a couple of PB of disc space...
Put a memtest86 cd in and boot. You'll see the cpu freq and amount of ram right away. You may need to go into bios to tell it to boot from cd before hdd - leave it that way.
In the unlikely event that its a very old 95 era machine heavily upgraded you might need to use a memtest floppy.
NT
Many thanks to all for the advice, I have just ran this program:
Jim
If you have a specific need, then great - I ran some old 486 machines until about 2003 as they were just doing a simple job using a DOS application. It was the equipment they were connected to which went unsupportable first!
It looks like the motherboard is for a Celeron, so given the age, and the fact the earliest 266 Celeron didn't have a L2 cache, it could be anything between 300Mhz and 533Mhz.
You should be able to confirm from the chip if none of the other methods can correctly identify it. See
Makes sense - 466 is one of the flavours.
... unless it's got Vista on it :-)
What made me upgrade was the terrible power consumption. My firewall was using 60-70W, and it's on 24/7. A faster CPU and I'm now using 15W..total.
Old WiN 98 machines with half a gig of ram will run linux well enough.
Ditto for my headless server.
install as standard.
Peter Scott
I agree, it is very good.
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