Hi Dave,
You can still get many more good years of use out
of your 486 if you switch over to a Unix based Operating
System Like OpenBSD, SuSE or RedHat.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of M$ windows software,
even if it can run, will be extremely sloooow on a 486.
M$ Messenger requires the following: 486DX/66 or higher
with 8 Meg of ram; Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me,
Windows 2000, or Windows NT 4.0 or later.
Now you will still run into slow operation if you try to
use the unix version of a graphical desktop called
"X windows" but one difference between unix and windows
is that you don't have to use a graphical window you
can use a text based console similar to a Dos console.
A major benefit of using a unix type operating system
is that there are many hundreds of text based tools
that you can use for email and browsing the Internet.
Such as Pine or Elm for email:
http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/pine/
http://www.instinct.org/elm/
http://www.webfoot.com/advice/email.top.html
and Lynx for browsing:
http://lynx.browser.org/
Don't throw out the baby with the bath water! Many
486's are acting as routers, email servers, web servers etc.
Because unix is such an efficient operating system it can
do much without having to have the latetest and greatest
PC.
So, Scrape off that old windows system, get yourself a
book on unix and start using unix, you'll be glad you did!
There are many places to get a version of unix for your pc
at a fraction of the price you will pay for M$ products try
going to:
http://www.openbsd.com/
http://cart.cheapbytes.com/cgi-bin/cart
books on unix:
http://safari2.oreilly.com/table.asp?cat=8
Enjoy!