🚀 go-pugleaf

I don't know whether these are the right groups for this sort of
question, please feel free to tell me if not.
I have been asked to set up a small network for use in a homework
club/ youth club situation. I do not know anything about networking
but am fairly experienced with computers in general. The club has been
given a quantity of (up to sixteen) Dell Optiflex 450s/L
computers.These are 486 Sx50's with 213Mb HDD and memory varying
between 4 and 16 Mb. It is possible that a fairly powerful machine
coud be acquired too if necessary.They would like to run W98(!) on
them. Because of the small Hdds, is it possible for the OS to be on
another machine so that they could bo booted to DOS and then run
windows from a remote? Would it be necessary to have separate copies
of W98 (or 95) on the remote system, one for each workstation? Would
this be a client/server arrangement or peer-to-peer?
I have bought an 8 port hub, and some NIC's just reallly to play with.
I have rigged two of the computers up using WFW 3.11. I can access the
other hard drive and can chat and pop-up. I cant so far use mail. (I
created a WGPO, but have now forgotten the password, do I just delete
the directory and start again?) How do become a new user of the WGPO?
I also can not access the CD rom on one of the computers, I have set
it as a shared drive but the other computer finds the share name and
reports "no files found", and the CD rom does not even spin up when it
does this.
As you can see, what I need is a good all round beginner's guide to
networking. Does anyone know of such a resource on the net? I have
looked around but not much joy so far.
Also I get "list of servers not available" when I try to do
things...(cant remember which things, its getting late)
On a network, is it poss to share computer power, ie if one has say a
486sx50 8Mb RAM and a PII 450 128Mb RAM is the 486 machine's
performance going to be enhanced?
if anyone could spare the time to have a bash at these Q's I would be
very grateful. Replies more than welcome here or at
spug@intlog.demon.co.uk
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