VOGONS


First post, by cyclone3d

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Saw this on the Sony support page today.

Dear Valued Customers, […]
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Dear Valued Customers,

Please be informed that Sony's support has ended for VAIO® computers that shipped with the following Microsoft® Windows® operating systems preinstalled:

Windows 95
Windows 98
Windows 98 SE
Windows ME
Windows 2000
Windows XP
Windows Vista
As of March 1, 2018, we will no longer provide drivers and software for download for these computers.

So if you have any Sony products and you want a backup for drivers, etc, you might want to get downloading.

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 1 of 138, by blurks

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These driver & software files probably consume only a few gigabytes of space and generate only little network traffic. I always wonder, what the big problem is to keep them available...
That (among other services) divides good from mediocre vendors...

Reply 2 of 138, by vvbee

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blurks wrote:

These driver & software files probably consume only a few gigabytes of space and generate only little network traffic. I always wonder, what the big problem is to keep them available...
That (among other services) divides good from mediocre vendors...

Not many people though are going to view sony as mediocre for dropping win 95. I'm mildly surprised about xp, but they may have noticed a lack of demand for support there as well.

Reply 4 of 138, by cyclone3d

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keenmaster486 wrote:

Can a mirror be made of these files?

I'm going to download everything on their old support ftp, but a lot of these files are named differently from what I can tell... maybe the web page coding just renames them automagically before passing them to the browser to download???

A lot of the stuff on the ftp seems to not be available via the web page anyway.

I'm not sure how in the world I would be able to mirror the website for all the old computers. There is software that can mirror sites, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't catch stuff that you have to go through multiple layers of drop-down menus to get to.

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 5 of 138, by schmatzler

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blurks wrote:

That (among other services) divides good from mediocre vendors...

Lenovo still keeps their old DOS and Win95 drivers, even for IBM notebooks.
They even made an "End of Life" portal just for old machines:
https://download.lenovo.com/eol/index.html

Take this, Sony.

"Windows 98's natural state is locked up"

Reply 6 of 138, by AlaricD

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Creative Labs STILL has tons of stuff available, even DOS and Win3.1 drivers for the SB Pro and stuff like that. And that's CREATIVE LABS, of all people. If they can do it, there's no excuse for Sony to not do it.

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Reply 10 of 138, by Ozzuneoj

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This sounds like a job for WinHTTrack (or something similar):
https://www.httrack.com/page/2/

I've used this program a couple times and I have entire copies of valuable websites with downloads.

Hopefully the Sony site is laid out in such a way that it would work with programs like this.

Now for some blitting from the back buffer.

Reply 13 of 138, by cyclone3d

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Very nice.

I am in the process of downloading everything from the ftp right now with FileZilla.

I am thinking that this is not just the old ftp, but the actual current ftp as well.

Downloaded 2,553 files so far. They have limited the download per connection to around 1MB/s.

It is still parsing directories... up to 255,414 files to still download and rising.

Not sure how much space this is going to end up taking.

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 15 of 138, by Stiletto

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For what it's worth, I clued in ArchiveTeam. Dunno if any of them are working on it though.

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do the Fandango!" - Queen

Stiletto

Reply 16 of 138, by cyclone3d

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Auzner wrote:

If you just get the EXE and ZIPs, that's all you really need. The script can just pull the metadata for you so you can reference what everything is. When it's more polished for an entire archival rip, I have access to a 4Gbps+ connection to try it on. I will try to make a jenky parallelization.

I'm pulling down everything, including manuals in PDF and HTML... and other files that are also not in .ZIP or .EXE format.

Looks like it is going to take around 400GB of space for everything.

I upped my downloads to 7 at a time. Not sure if they have a limit per IP or not like most ftps have set up.

I could really go to about 15 downloads at a time, but don't want the ftp to kill my connection completely so I am kinda playing it safe.

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 18 of 138, by cyclone3d

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Finally finished downloading all the files from the ftp this morning.

I haven't used any of those scripts do give me a index or anything, but here is what I have found with the little bit of looking I have done so far.

The huge plus is that it looks like they have folders for the different laptops / laptop series with all the original drivers. They also have folders for all the original apps.

None of these are listed on the web page at all that I saw.

For the newer-ish laptops they also have the XP/Vista/7/8 upgrade/downgrade packages which is probably also going to be helpful. I really doubt that these are listed on the web page for download.

Another thing I noticed on the web page for a good number of older laptops is that the links they provide for the manuals and spec sheets are incorrect / give a 404 error when you try to download them.

I'm guessing that instead of spending a huge amount of time/money to fix everything to work they just decided to kill the downloads for all the older computers. It will be interesting to see if they wipe the files from the ftp or not.

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK