Because there recently has been a rash of bad cap reports with Dell PCs, it's likely that your Dell PC has bad caps!!! Please go to the following web site below for more information: http://badcaps.net
Actually, if the RAM is stable, you probably can leave the turbo setting on and disabling the assign IRQ for VGA option isn't a good idea, because video cards require an IRQ and thus doing that can cause the video card driver installation to fail.
First off, Windows 9x isn't "emulating" 32-bit code, it has real 32-bit code, but it's hybrided with 16-bit code, thus causes confusions. Also, it's not just a "GUI shell" on DOS! Otherwise, many games wouldn't run on that OS!
LOL. I doubt that a PC made in 1999 would outperform a Celeron 850 mhz, because they weren't even such thing as anything faster than 600 mhz back in 1999.
LOL. How can it physically damage a hard disk drive? Are you literally saying that an EMM386 conflict can cause a hard disk drive to get damaged so that you can't even reformat it anymore?