First post, by DosFreak
- Rank
- l33t++
So I started this new job about 2 months ago. (I'm a network admin so I do everthing a network admin would do from helpdesk to servers.).
Anyways there are dozens of old and broken laptops just laying around.....So I start digging around and what do I see? Three IBM laptops! A P1, a P2, and a P3!
Now all of the P3's are still usable by customers so I'm not sure I can take the P3 home (It's only a P3 500 so I'm sure I can convince him 😀 ), but I do know for sure that the P1 and the P2 are mine! All mine! Muahahhaa.......ahem.
Anyways, I brought the IBM Thinkpad 760xl home with me last night and plan to play with it over the weekend.
Specs:
IBM Thinkpad 760XL
Processor: Pentium 166mhz
RAM: 64mb
Video Card: Trident 9685 PCI
Hard Drive: 2.1GB
NIC: Xircom CardBus Ethernet II 10/100
Sound: ESS1688 AudioDrive
USB: PCMCIA USB2 Controller.
Some problems I've had to overcome....
When I found this thing at work I booted it up I noticed it had 64mb! Holy crap! That was one of the most suprising things about it.
It already had Windows 98 installed but being a person who likes a clean machine I just had to wipe it.....unfortunately.....
The machine has a dock connector, a network card, and a floppy drive. That's it! I don't have the dock, and I don't have a PCMCIA CDROM drive either. So how the heck was I going to install Windows 98?
I tried a DOS boot disk with the XIRCOM network drivers loaded and it should have worked but I was never able to get it to work. (When I later got Windows 98 installed and installed the Thinkpad Utilities and enabled Carbus I got the card to work in Windows....mabye something similar needs to be done with DOS?)
If I had an LPT/Serial port on this thing I could have used laplink but of course those ports are only on the dock.
I also tried the PCMCIA USB controller with DOS USB drivers but that didn't work either because probably for the same reason the Xircom card didn't work. I probably need to enable CardBus.
So my only option left was to use a floppy. Great, like I'm going to transfer Windows 98 to this laptop using floppies. NO WAY!
Finally, a bright idea hit me. I took the hard drive out of the laptop and stuck it in the other IBM P2, I then loaded up the Ultimate Boot CD, partitioned and formatted the drive (One 1500mb partition and a 500mb partition), I then stuck Windows 98 on the second partition and made the HD bootable.
Then I stuck the HD back in the original laptop and installed Windows 98! YAY!
I finally got the network card working last night by enabling CardBus and started transferring files but it would be nice if I could get the USB card working. The card shows up in Device Manager just fine but it's not recognizing anything I connect to it (LAN/USB/whatever), nothing happens.
Some questions:
Anyone familiar with the ESS 1688? I loaded up Duke3d and was able to choose SoundBlaser and Adlib and the SFX/Music effects were working just fine and sounded pretty good.
How good is the Trident video card for compatibility? So far I just loaded up Duke3D in 640x480 and it ran pretty well (slightly faster than DosBox on my machine.)
The plan with this laptop is to actually use an old machine for compatibility testing instead of NTVDM/VPC/Vmware/DosEmu/Bochs.
I didn't bring the P2 home with me this weekend and I don't have the specs so I'll post those once I get back to work.