Save your old PC
Fifty British pounds (or local equivalent) and half an hour on an auction site might give your PC the shot in the arm it craves.
Whatever machine you’re trying to resurrect or rejuvenate, it’s always worth getting as much RAM into it as possible. Retailers won’t stock this any more, but you’ll find plenty of DDR1 or SDRAM sticks on auction sites for cheap. Just make sure to check your motherboard’s manual to find which speeds and stick combinations are required and whether you need ECC memory (unlikely). The model number for the motherboard should be visible in the BIOS somewhere, so type that into DuckDuckGo and you’ll find a manual in no time. Later old hardware is much less fussy than old-old hardware about mixing and matching memory capacities. So, if your machine is old-old, aim to put identical sticks in all the slots. Or in a pair of the slots (usually the two nearest the CPU or two of the same colour) if that maxes out capacity. You can, generally, mix speeds, but the faster modules will only run at the speed of the slower ones.
Speaking of memory, now’s a good time to dispel the myth that 32-bit hardware cannot use more than 4GB of RAM. This is not true. At least, it is not true for all 32-bit hardware. Windows XP did odd memory management, so that only about 3GB of RAM could actually be addressed. Early 32-bit hardware rarely supported anything close to 4GB of memory (your typical 386 wouldn’t have had more than 4MB), with the first consumer-grade machines sporting such opulence not appearing until the early 2000s. But Linux didn’t support it due to bus restrictions, rather than any logical limitations. In fact, if 1GB memory modules had been widely available (for less than the GDP of a small country) in 1995, and your motherboard could support more than four of them, you could happily make use of all that memory.
House of PAE-n
That year, ’95, saw the introduction of the Portable Address Extension (PAE) on Intel’s Pentium Pro and AMD’s Athlon processors. A little maths will reassure you that you need 32 bits to uniquely address every byte amongst four gigabytes: 10 for each byte in a kilobyte, 20 for the kilobytes in a gigabyte, and two more for your four GB. Technically, we should use the kibibyte, mibibyte, gibibyte units here (as we’re working with powers of two and not powers of ten), but we think they look silly. However, if your machine has no registers wider than 32 bits, there’s nothing to stop it using two (or, more correctly, one and part of another one) such registers to address more. This is what the PAE CPU extension standardised. Obviously, chipsets and buses would need to understand this addressing, too, and such hardware didn’t come about until the early noughties. PAE allows for a 36-bit address space, enabling u
