>>3393491
>Since most of the bloat is JS and CSS anyway does that mean the browser discards what it cannot interpret thus not killing the system RAM? I guess I will find out whenever I get the setup working.
Yes, but depending on RAM big threads can still load slowly even on Arachne, but it worked for my 486.
>1)I seriously need to make a backup of the HDD, is there W95 LAN file sharing software that is XP compatible?
It is, even works up to Windows 10 or Mac OS X or Linux, you need Microsoft Network Client 3.0 for DOS and you can mount network shares as drives in DOS.
It's better to just run the FTP server from mTCP and something like FileZilla on your main PC and just copy everything off the 486 or onto. But you can use the Microsoft file sharing to run things over the network if you have a small hard drive.
Another way is just to get a cheap USB-ATA adapter and directly connect the old drive to a newer computer, but this way might be more hassle if your system is all nicely set up and hard to get open.
>2)Are there Serial/COM emulators and IPX drivers for DOS that use the ethernet port instead? The same way I'm supposed to set up TCP packets exchange. That will seriously blow my mind, being able to play DOS games on my 486 with other people running DOSBox.
Yes, IPX works fine but I don't think DOS had any serial-over-ethernet software but I'm not sure, most games have an IPX option anyways.
There are USB serial adapters too for newer machines that would let you use the serial port of the 486 together with a newer machine.