386 or 586

how can i tell if i have a 386 or 586, i remember that when i had windows 95 i had a 286, this is what i have now.

Processor Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 1.70GHz
Processor Speed 1.66 GHz
Memory (RAM) 256 MB
Operating System Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition with sp2
Operating System Version 5.1.2600

i dont know what else to list. thanks

 

I'm not sure what you are getting at.
386,486 and 586's disappeared from computing many, many, years ago.

You obviously have a pentium 4, by your own specs.
This in no way relates to 386's or 586's, except that they are old Intel CPU's.
P 4's are light years ahead of the old 386's, etc.

Try http://www.majorgeeks.com/Intel®_Processor_Identification_Utility_Windows_Version_d4984.html

from the MG front page today. This will give you all the details of your Intel P4.

If I've missed your point, I'm sorry. Please come back if need be. Bazza

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Are you installing a Linux os? I think the Pentium 4 is just a Pentium 4 if you are wondering about compiling a kernel or which Linux to download.
An i386 Linux should install on most processors I would think.
The Pentium is a 586 and the Pentium II (Pro) is a 686 (maybe someone will correct me if I'm wrong on that).

 

well you probably have a 478 socket, and a 586 was PI so had they continued with the processor naming scheme *I'm going to extrapalate* it would be an 886.
running at 1660 mhz (under power setting switch it to always on to pick up those last 4 mhz)

 

yes that is what i am doing, playing with differnt versions of lunix, i wanted to download more and was getting confused as to what i needed, i ran into t some that i could not get to work, thought i may have picked the wrong no. i was picking i386 on all, since it takes like 4 hours to download the iso's, i did not want to download the wrong ones. thanks

 

I was thinking that the i686 would apply to everything from the Pentium II on, except the IA-64 (which would have been i786 I think). I don't what the dual cores would be for a linux distro. The "i" before the 386, 486 etc. was added by Intel because they couldn't copywrite numbers. The 586 refers to Pentium class processors while the i586 refers to the Pentium.

I downloaded the i386 (or i686 if there was one) for my PII and they usually worked fine (well actually a little slow and sluggish because they seem a little bloated); but not always, some distros are a little buggy or they have a hard time detecting your hardware, etc. I found the Fedora Core 4 the most stable for my PII and I think it was probably an i386 file. I think the i386 downloads would work ok for your processor. With Gentoo you can optimize it for the P4 (but I think you just download the x86 file).

I had read about which version of the distro to download for which processor somewhere but I just don't remember where that was. The Gentoo forums are very helpful and there seems to be a lot of good info there. I have played around with the Gentoo distro for a long time but never mastered it. The problem(?) with Gentoo is that it takes a long time to install a really complete system. You have to compile everything and on my PII it was just agonizingly slow; even with a broadband connection. What I started doing was buying Linux Format (usually the DVD version) at the bookstore when they had something I wanted to play around with. It was more enjoyable to have most of what I needed on cd or dvd and then just update online.

The Gentoo is the most educational-- I think-- and with your P4 it wouldn't be too slow. When configuring a kernel in Gentoo, I am pretty sure that you would specify Pentium 4 as the processor type whereas I would specify i686 for my PII. I have a couple of AMD64 systems now and although I could download and install the Gentoo x86 version, it would be more appropriate to get the amd_64 version because the whole point in going to the trouble of installing Gentoo is to learn how to optimize the kernel for your particular hardware.

I would like to continue to play around with the alternative os's. I bought the Linux Format recently with the 3 different BSD's on DVD and it would be fun to install them (or in my case-- try to install them). I just have too many other things I should be doing right now and I shouldn't even be online doing this until I get caught up on other things a bit