My sister in law want to get on the internet.She has a Acer Acros 4790 75mhz Pentium.I can get ahod of about 64 megs of the ram it requires pretty cheap.I also have a 56k modem laying around.My question is if this has Windows 98se loaded on it,will it download web pages fast enough.I get a constant 50k download on dialup around here.Evergreen used to have a cpu upgrade to 233 mhz pretty cheap[MWPro]but thet dont list it anymore.

Thanks

This would all work fine.  It might have problems with the later versions of IE explorer I would stick with 4.0.  The processor upgrades arent the greatest.  You upgrade the processor speeds but not the bus or memory speeds.  Creates bottle necks which really slow things down.  I would watch ebay for systems.  You can pick up a Pentium 266 system for under $100.

I wouldn't mess with trying to upgrade the system.  She'll never be happy with it.  75mhz is not much these days.  You might take a look at pricewatch.com, too.  I've had consistently good experiences there.  You can get something a lot better pretty cheap.

"Getting on the internet" used to be just about reading HTML pages.... which did not require much of anything in the way of resources.  We browsers were very light, and did not have big memory signatures.  Pages were written with text and a few graphics.

The wolrd has changed.  No longer can you get that old beater PC "just for gettin on the net"

The problem is, the web browsers of today (Netscape 4/IE4 and up) all use tons of RAM.  Just opening pages with less than 64 megs and you will be swapping to disk like crazy.... I dont like a "net" machine to have less than 128.

Also, it aint just HTML text anymore.  Something like half of all major websites use Flash or similar animated technology in some way.  This is very CPU intensive.  Now we have javascript, real audio, tons of different multimedia applications,.... and all of these use RAM and CPU.

75mhz aint gonna cut it... unless you like to wait... and things not even work.  Evergreen upgrades are not worth the money.  Find a cheap used system, if you want to save money... that is at lease a PII-266, and takes DIMM memory, so you can upgrade it inexpensively.  I have seen a system like this with a 10gb drive, CD, 266, and 256 ram sell complete for $150.

Much better choice.

Thanks guys.Whoops and gal.Thats what I was thinkin.I may stik in the modem and get the ram if its just a few bucks.Use opera for a browser and give it to my mom for email.