So my old Toshiba Pentium Laptop died. When I say Pentium.. I mean Pentium I.
I liked having a Windows 9x computer on tap. Yeah, yeah DOSbox works well.. but I have some old hardware that needs Win 9x and a serial port. Sure I can do a USB converter and probably get it working on modern hardware but well.. its easy to just turn on the Pentium laptop.
So anyway it died-died.. well it died or the charger died who knows which. I also had an old Thinkpad.. like Pentium III old.. had XP on it but its stickered for Windows 2000 and checking front.. Designed for Windows 98. OK Sweet newer Windows 9x box coming up and this machine actually works.
Fudge.. I forgot how much of a PITA old windows was.
Installing wasn't so bad at first, I found a bootable Windows 98 SE ISO. This was helpful because this thinkpad has an ultrabay to swap the CD for a Floppy and I don't have the Floppy for it. So it being able to boot to the CD saved me $8 on eBay, good start!
Oh no Windows won't format the hard drive. Says there's a problem. FDISK / Format it.. no go. Burn a copy of Hirens, check drive. Drive is fine. DOD Format drive just in case. Still no go. Apparently you have to boot to DOS from the Windows CD then run the installer there not directly from the disk. I vaguely remember this being a thing.
Windows seems to install OK, next lets find some drivers.
In Windows 9x installing drivers is a chore. Run the installer which unpacks and installs the driver. Now reboot. After you reboot go to the driver folder and run that setup, then reboot again. Each time you reboot Windows will bitch about every bit of hardware it doesn't have a driver for..
OK reboot again, it finds the hardware.. you tell it where the driver it is.. Success! Wait insert Windows 98 CD. OK no problem. No insert the Windows 98 CD.. what? Finally remembered that Windows 9x has no fucking clue where the cabs are. The location is defaults to is crazy wrong. You have to manually point it to the WIN98 folder.
So drivers in but Windows bitches about missing DLLS, have to run a SFC to restore/unpack the DLLs from the Cabs. Then have to figure out which system folder these DLLs need to be in. Finally just copy them all over \system, \system32, etc. That seems to work.
FINALLY it's all good.. I think. I have sound and the monitor is running in more than 16 colors. We'll see how networking works at it doesn't want to read a 1GB thumb drive (shocker..)
As much as i bitch about Microsoft they have come a long way (perhaps fallen back down recently but that's another story). You can install a fresh copy of Windows in about 16 minutes on a SSD.. Back in the day it was an all evening event... and I didn't even have to download the drivers at 28.8k.
