Besides games the only other programs I have installed on my 486 are mIRC 5.9, IE 5, and Outlook.

Tiger433 wrote:

What programs and which versions of them you use at your 486 and Pentium 60-133 rig?

Norton Commander.
Norton utilities.
Various packers/unpackers.
Fast tracker 2

I can not remember the versions. They are all dos editions.

What about... Adobe Premiere? No I am not even joking.

Cakewalk.
Your favorite image editor.
Microsoft Office... Or WordPerfect/SuperCalc/Lotus or whatever you prefer to use.

I generally install different things on different systems. My P90 Satellite Pro has a complete install of Office97, mostly for WINWORD because I use it to write scripts and such. Also used it to write my book though most of the final editing is being done with a modern system.

Back THEN.... Winzip 6.3, some WinAMP 1.x, Cooledit 1.33, McAfee Antivirus, WS-FTP, IE3, Paint Shop Pro 4, GIF Construction Set, Word 97,...

An old favorite of mine (and one I still have an unopened copy of as well as my opened copy) is Novell Perfectworks 2.1! It taught me spreadsheets and such. I used to spend hours going through the large magazines and tech newspapers, recording their prices for different PC parts, and using the information to product build-sheets to put together systems for customers.

brostenen wrote:

Norton Commander. Norton utilities. Various packers/unpackers. Fast tracker 2 […]
Show full quote

Norton Commander.
Norton utilities.
Various packers/unpackers.
Fast tracker 2

I can not remember the versions. They are all dos editions.

Funny, I run these exact same programs! Check out My HP Vectra VL5 / Pentium MMX 😀

DOS
Norton Utilities
Xtree Gold (Just cause I had it back in the day, not really used)
PKzip/unzip

Win3x
Works 3.0 or Office 4.3 (had works back in the day but found the copy of office in a customers server room so must of being fate!
WinZip, (prefer WinRAR but used winzip back then so it stays)
IE5
Paint Shop Pro, sometimes

Win9x
Office XP (Just Word and Excel)
IE5
Winamp 2.95
WinRAR
daemon tools lite.
Tweak UI

Also Does anyone know where I can get a copy of the 128 bit encryption version of Netscape Navigator 3 for Windows 3.x? That would complete my 3.x builds I think

HighTreason wrote:

What about... Adobe Premiere? No I am not even joking.

Nice Yorkshire accent there - Leeds? Hull? Accy??? And have you had that copy of Premiere forever or did you pick it up subsequently?

All my old machines have Word 6 from Office 4.3. Used it so much back in the day that it is still my goto Word proc. Familiarity I guess..........

Win9x:
I'd rather have Office 2000 or 97 on a 9x system, just because its UI matches the system's one instead of the WinXP-ish eye candy in Office XP. But they all should work just fine.
Also I stay away from IE6, and stick to 5.5, because IE6 causes some weird bugs in the shell (me being unable to show text on Explorer's toolbars, some hiccups and lags, etc.) besides having XP-like icons and toolbar images.
Firefox 2.x + Noscript works.... but even on my faster K6-2 it feels sluggish. But hey, if you need to browse something quickly it will do a better job rendering modern pages than IE5.5. Oh, and do yourself a favour and disable scrips in IE too. Specially on a slower processor. Oh, and you need some tweaking to revert the menus to the classic style.
Novell Netdrive is great! It allows you to mount FTP folders as drives, and it works much better than using either Filezilla or IE's buit in FTP client.

DOS:
4DOS. Just 4DOS. DOS without 4DOS isn't nearly as fun! Just configure it to go back to uppercase file names, ignore descriptions, and add some colors to the dir listing and you're good to go!
MPXPlay - best MP3/AAC/OGG player for DOS IMHO
DOSSHELL - Whenever you need the task switcher (not very often)
Norton Disk Doctor - I like it better than Scandisk
UIDE (now XHDD/XDVD) - for late DOS systems. Disk caching + UDMA support for DOS
VIDE-CDD.SYS - The CD driver that gave me the least trouble ever
CuteMouse - 1.9.x version is trouble-free on all my systems. 2,0 and 2.1 have issues with some of my systems.

For DOS
Volkov Commander
MPXPlay
Norton Utilities
F-Prot Antivirus

For Windows 3.1x
Winplay
Office 4
Paint Shop Pro

I have Photoshop 3.0 and early corel Draw installed on my machines - as early as 486DX2-66 - and they run it normally on Win 311 with 16 and more megs of ram... Also early versions of ACDsee for win 3.1x - I'm a photographer, so even on old machines I try to edit pictures...

Also there is a very nice program, called DSS which can play mp3 from DOS on any PC, beggining from 386DX with cache) It supports SB and covox)