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anyone good with ye olde laptops
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
in General Chat
i got given, well i took upon the challenge of trying to get a p1 75 MHz 40MB ram 750MB hard drive running something modern smoothly ie cut down linux
it has no floppy drive, no usb, no network and an unbootable cd drive..... :eek:
so i just resorted to shoving the hard drive in a usb casing and messing with it's contents
anyway even puppy linux was too much for it, though i did get to the grub prompt and dsl just didnt like the model of hard drive so that was kind of crap, i made the hard drive bootable into dos from a windows 98 backup floppy with fdisk c: /s followed by sys c: and fdisk /mbr
on this computer, even when kept in a usb case, it will boot into win98 dos prompt, this old laptop though it just sits at a blank screen and doesnt even give an error lol
i suspect the BIOs got screwed as i got some warning about basic rom being missing and needing a floppy disk when i turned it on lol and i cant be arsed to find a floppy drive that will work on it as i remember old laptops are fussy to what they had in them....
i'm doing this solely as a challenge, for zero money being spent, only my time though i think i may just try something i never tried before, throwing it out of a window LOL
it has no floppy drive, no usb, no network and an unbootable cd drive..... :eek:
so i just resorted to shoving the hard drive in a usb casing and messing with it's contents
anyway even puppy linux was too much for it, though i did get to the grub prompt and dsl just didnt like the model of hard drive so that was kind of crap, i made the hard drive bootable into dos from a windows 98 backup floppy with fdisk c: /s followed by sys c: and fdisk /mbr
on this computer, even when kept in a usb case, it will boot into win98 dos prompt, this old laptop though it just sits at a blank screen and doesnt even give an error lol
i suspect the BIOs got screwed as i got some warning about basic rom being missing and needing a floppy disk when i turned it on lol and i cant be arsed to find a floppy drive that will work on it as i remember old laptops are fussy to what they had in them....
i'm doing this solely as a challenge, for zero money being spent, only my time though i think i may just try something i never tried before, throwing it out of a window LOL
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* A personal computer with a 486DX 66 megahertz (MHz) or faster processor (Pentium central processing unit recommended).
* 16 megabytes (MB) of memory (24 MB recommended).
* A typical upgrade from Windows 95 requires approximately 195 MB of free hard disk space, but the hard disk space may range from between 120 MB and 295 MB, depending on your computer configuration and the options that you choose to install.
* A full install of Windows 98 on a FAT16 drive requires 225 MB of free hard disk space, but may range from between 165 MB and 355 MB, depending on your computer configuration and that options that you choose to install.
* A full install of Windows 98 on a FAT32 drive requires 175 MB of free hard disk space, but may range from between 140 MB and 255 MB, depending on your computer configuration and the options that you choose to install.
* One 3.5-inch high-density floppy disk drive.
* VGA or higher resolution (16-bit or 24-bit color SVGA recommended).
on ebay i found a p3 600 MHz with 128MB ram for like 7quid near my house in a monster tower, i think i'm gonna get it and use it for all my dos-win98 games get myself a pci graphics from then, and then it's even better
It's because a machine of Pentium 2/3 spec running Windows 98 will be able to run Placebo's DOS and Win 9X games. Some won't run on Windows XP/7, not even in compatibility mode, and the current virtualisation solutions don't offer decent enough graphic card 3D emulation to warrant playing old games on that.
you got it, i won that pc for £8.20 and it's near me so my mum will give me a lift to collect it, it currently has windows me, but i'm gona try strip the drivers from the me installation and use a fresh 98se install, and if i find a riva tnt2 or voodoo 3000+ pci/agp card around i'll whack that in there, and then all is good for old games
dos games can be done quite well in dosbox now if you use the right 'boot' settings, but the annoying ones are the windows 95/98 only games cause xp and 7 doesn't like them a lot
plus it's a cheap tinkering project as i have usb drives (with 98 drivers) and accessories galore
A lot of machines from the late 1990's couldn't boot from the CD-ROM.
yup, if you on about the really old laptop i found kicking about, i tried that, the bios doesn't seem to like it, it's FAT16 formatted with a command.com that can boot up on any other computer i put it in apart from this... so it's the laptop that's arsey, according to forums everytime you format the OS you need to install soe toshiba bio flash off floppy, which i dont have so i gave up lol
Partition needs to be made active from within fdisk, too.
i done that
i made a bootable floppy on one of my old computers, done a fdisk c: /s to make it system, and then done a sys a: c: to make a system copy of the floppy on the hard drive
as i said it works as a bootable hard drive, booting into a dos prompt on every comp apart from this old laptop, just sticks at a blank screen, not even any errors, like the controller is unable to see it
needless to say i've put it in the recycling bag for rubbish men
my new old p3 600mhz comes tomorrow, and i keep losing windows 98se auctions on ebay, one went for £20 earlier LOL
nah i have a backup here cough cough
specs it came with
onboard graphics
P3 600MHz
128MB ram
10GB hard drive
broken DVD drive (pcb board was gone)
soundblaster sound card
CD-RW
Floppy
Beige tower
so far it has instead
one less DVD drive
120GB hard drive
pci network card
casing is removed so i can spray paint it
and i'm currently looking at a voodoo 2000 pci card (there's no AGP socket) for less than a tenner
and i have
windows 98se up til last patches
IE 6 sp1
media player 6
firefox 2 & noscript
irfanview as default picture editor
mediaplayer classic & vlc
7zip
virtual clone drive for mounting ISOs
access to NAS drive on network
worms 2
settlers 2
unreal tournament
quake
theme hospital
cannon fodder
jedi knight dark forces 2 + expansion
my mate will lend me blood 2 and carmageddon so i can 'backup'
can anyone recommend any useful application/tools/games?
yeah i need to hunt for the elusive pci versions as this damned computer has no agp