na that's not true i have a running windows 3.1 system running at my house right now i live in conroe tx and got the computer from my grandmother about a year ago.

Me wants linux, but me has a few questions.
1. What kind of linux should I get? I have a Pentium II 350MHz, dial-up, and definitely no CD-RW/CD Burner

2. How different is it from ye old win98?

3. Will my old BIOS support dual-boot?

4. I DONT WANT MY HARD DRIVE REFORMATTED!!!!!!!!!1

Try getting your hands on a live distribution ("Knoppix" being the most common in my experience). It'll give you a quick taste of what using the graphical part of Linux is all about. It is quite different to '98 - with Windows, it tries to make things easier for you, whereas Linux distributions appear to be built by programmers and not designers so they sometimes act a little... oddly. It's just a case of getting used to it, I suppose.

1. As answered above, ZipSlack might work well. You could also try Debian.

2. It won't give you BSOD's, and you can run it forever minus a day (my current uptime with Slackware 8.1 is 171 days). :)

You can run KDE on it (if you have the RAM and patience) or another window managers/desktop environment that suits your taste. I like XFCE, because it's lightweight and easy to use.

3. As I said above, the BIOS doesn't need to support dual booting.

4. You might be able to repartition your hard drive without completely reformatting it. I'm not up to speed on the various partition programs available for Linux, so I can't recommend any, but I know that the good ones are really good at what they do and are relatively easy to use.

If you don't want to repartition, ZipSlack runs on a FAT partition. You don't get all the benefits of a better filesystem (like speed), but then again you don't have to repartition the hard drive either.

NB: I haven't used ZipSlack (I've never needed it), so I don't know how well it works.

I run SuSE 9.1, but for some reason, I've never made it past 30 days uptime. Sooner or later, it will either hardlock after a few weeks (I suspect a hardware-related problem, as it usualy happens when I'm configuring hardware), or some kind of error will occur accessing a USB device (usually the TI Silverlink) and my USB ports will be hosed until the next reboot, or there will be a power failure, or I'll decide to rearrange my computer setup, requiring me to shut it down and unplug it. :-)

Still much better than the uptime I've enjoyed(?) with Windows 9x and ME, though!

Now, I'm experimenting with the books Linux from Scratch and Beyond Linux from Scratch where I'm building my own Linux system, so when I work with it I have to reboot, which makes the average uptime even less. :-)

My computer with the 171-day uptime doesn't have a network card. I want to get one, but I fear the day when I do, because I'll have to shut it down to install it. :(

Yeah, I heard about people who lament over their uptimes when they install a new kernel and have to reboot.

One time I got mad because I accidentally reboot my system (typed "init 6" when I meant "init 5"), and it reset my uptime unnecessarily.

The best (or worst) way I lost my uptime was by bumping the power switch with my foot.

Then another time I was tilting the tower, trying to tweak the hardware while it's running (stupid, I know), and it just shut off! I recognised the high-pitch sound the power supply makes when there's a short, so something (like a screw) must've shorted the circuit and caused the power to shut off.

I've done a lot of stupid cr@p like that with my computer. It still runs fine, though, especially since I've upgraded to a different computer now. :)

It seems that almost every "crash" on that computer running GNU/Linux was caused by hardware, which was mostly caused by me.

The people here won't kill you for saying 'crap'.
In fact, the staff of TiCalc uses photoshopped pictures to intimidate us.
POWER TO THE PEOPLE!!!!!
DOWN WITH COMMUNISM!!!!!

whoa. both of those are the exact same length...

The photo is not photoshopped.

I don't think I've ever accidentally hit the power or reset switches (I would have thought I'd have done that sooner or later). The power switch is set so that it has to be held down several seconds before it will respond, but I have to be careful about the reset button.

The other stupid thing I did was when I was trying to find a SysRq key combination, so I just started hitting random combinations. Gee, who would have thought there was one that'd immediately shut the system off? :-P

I once hit the reset button instead of the NMI (debugger) button on by G4 tower. And to make it worse, I got file system corruption.

All the trouble I have had with Linux has been due to me not knowing what I was really doing and mucking with things I shouldn't have been mucking with. I have learned the hard way what is safe and what you can change and what you can't. For example, don't try to use kernels not made for your system in an effort to gain better performance. When the package manager says there are dependency conflicts, particularly lots of them, don't hit "force anyway." Once I learned that (took many months and reinstalls!), it has been rock-solid and wonderful to use.

You probably will as things need a good reset now and then. If you know how to reset the dhcp daemon, you can even switch networks without a reboot. I have a wireless connection I use at school and cable Ethernet here, so I suspend and then kill and restart dhcpcd. The longest I have ever had my computer up for is about five days. It is quite noisy when the fan kicks on- sounds like a frigging hair dryer. It woke me up at night one time too many, so I decided to scrap the uptime record at 2:17 am. System worked perfectly, though. SuSE 9.3 is a stable distro and only really needs to be restarted if you install a new kernel or powersave programs. I obviously can't add much for internal hardware because I have a laptop, but I would need to turn it off anyway to avoid shorting out something.

I still have a computer running DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1 at my grandparents house. It hasn't crashed yet! (can't say this about my laptop running windows xp) I think it's wonderful.

HDD < 100 MB
5.25" FDD#2
3.5" FDD#1
3 COM ports (1 for mouse)
1 LPT port
1 VGA port
5-PIN Keyboard port
no modem
no network
no drivers
8-10" CRT

any questions? still more reliable than windows xp.

no modem, no network...no wonder it still works. You don't have to worry about a firewall not working or anything!

I had a DOS 6.22/Windows 3.1 computer and although it had its fair share of crashes and lockups, it did seem more stable than modern computers for the most part. It ran 24/7 and I don't recall having to reboot it all that much.

Of course, I didn't have a lot of software to run at the same time, and older software like this is usually a lot simpler so that could be why. I didn't even have Internet access.

The worst problem that I had (as well as the weirdest, and it only happened once) was one day when I was working on a QBasic program. I saved my file every few minutes while working on it, as usual. I was in Windows, so I also deleted a file or two that I didn't want anymore (don't remember what it was). My system started acting weird and eventually crashed several minutes later. When I rebooted, the QBasic program I was working on was reverted to the state it was in many saves ago (losing a lot of work), and the file(s) I deleted were back!

Must have been a glitch with the disk caching program. (What was it called in the DOS days? SmartDrive?)

Anybody ever remember playing with DriveSpace (or DoubleSpace) on an old DOS/Windows computer?

DOS? what's DOS? :-P

I hated DOS, although I learned quite a bit about it. When using Windows, I would avoid the DOS prompt as much as possible.

On the other hand, with a "real" command-line interface such as the Bash shell (*nix systems), I actually don't mind using CLI that much.

I remember making a menu system with batch files for the programs installed on the computer to make it easier for others to use. Later, I put ANSI.SYS in the CONFIG.SYS file and used escape codes to make some pretty colorzied text-based menus with simple boxes, etc. Only problem was that they displayed a little slower and it was a pain in the neck to firgure out all the escape sequences and get all the formatting right.

Oops, another "one-second" typo: "firgure" -> "figure"

I call it a "one-second typo" because they're noticed exactly one second after clicking the Post button. :-)

I never used it, but I remember seeing it in the system folder a lot, IIRC.

I tried DriveSpace 3 on Windows 98. It was interesting making floppy diskssiim bigger(even though I never filled up the disks enough to ned the extra space), but I got frustrated when the disks didn't work on computers without DriveSpace installed.
Oh well.

I mean ...disks look bigger...

I tried it a couple of times on the hard drive of my first computer. I never got all that much extra space, apparently because the average compression ratio of my files wasn't very high. What was frustrating was that it was always reporting more free space than I actually had, because it was using too high of a compression ratio for its estimate. It had an option for setting the compression ratio used for estimating free space, but for some stupid reason it wouldn't let me set it lower than a certain point that actually matched the compression ratio of my files.

Before that, I once made an extra compressed drive from the free space because I planned on saving a lot of big BMP files, and BMPs compress well. (That was before I discovered that Win3.1 Paintbrush could save files in PCX, which already compressed the files so I didn't have to use DriveSpace.)