keenmaster486 wrote:

II'm writing this post from Netscape.

I'd consider this an impressive feat on both sides. On one hand there's you with a boxy ThinkPad making posts to an active forum two decades after its production, and on the other hand is Vogons not being a bloated mess, allowing a twenty year-old PC to post to it. Using Netscape. Bravo.

From what I've read on this model, it as one Type III or two Type II CardBus slots. I'm guessing you've got the latter since all I can find on your WiFi card is a Type II version. Planning to do any upgrades with this laptop to really max it out?

Mr Smiley - yes, I'm myself amazed that I got any of this to work, and even more so at the actual speed of it. (edit: yes, I think it's a Type II card!)

So here's a quick update: I've decided that Netscape, though it's reasonably fast and works ok, is not much good for anything due to its lack of modern security protocols. The Links browser in DOS is faster, crashes less, and loads every site I throw at it. For example I could load Gmail in Links, but Netscape complains of security protocols. I'm writing this post from Links in DOS.

Attempts to use Pegasus Mail in Windows 3.11 to access Gmail were unsuccessful - security protocols again. I can't find a modern-compatible mail client for Win 3.x.

I've installed Office 4.3 though, and it works quite well.

One thing I think would be interesting would be to figure out how to do DOS LAN games with the WiFi. Any thoughts on how I would make that happen? I have both a packet driver and an IPX/ODI driver for the card. I'm having to use the packet driver for DOS, and IPX/ODI for Windows, in order to get on the internet. Could I set up some kind of IPX emulation so I could, for example, play DOOM over LAN, interfacing with DOSBox instances or other DOS computers on the WiFi?

Another thing I'd like to do is set up a Raspberry Pi to forward the WiFi from my iPhone hotspot, which only has WPA2 security, to an open or WEP secured network that the Thinkpad can connect to.

If you only need it for one device and have an ethernet PCMCIA card, a simple WiFi bridge like you'd use for a game console with ethernet only is probably the simplest solution.

Depending on what you need and what you already have picking up an older router (e.g. a WRT54G/GS) might be an easier solution than using a Raspberry Pi. Making an RPi function as a Wireless-Wireless bridge is going to require a second network interface and some work. Is there a eeason you need to bring an iPhone into it?

Requesting pictures of ThinkPad.

(edit: fixed images)

Here are some pictures of it (click for larger):

The Links DOS web browser in operation:

All pictures, plus some videos showing the laptop in operation, are in the Google Drive folder at this link:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1-6AAGbkTYAC … MAW8MtFlX2M01NU

In the videos, you can see several demonstrations of the software I've put on it, including Netscape struggling to do much of anything, Links performing wonderfully, and some games (including a strange scrolling problem with EGA games and the screen scaling).

So I have made one more modification to it before the Great Battery Rebuild: a Compact Flash card instead of the hard disk drive. Same capacity - 2 GB - but FAT32 this time.

I copied the entire contents of the old drive to the new one using a USB to Compact Flash adapter, and I placed it in the socket using a 2.5 inch IDE to Compact Flash adapter.

Everything runs great so far, faster than the old drive and much quieter and probably more reliable, but I'm running into problems with Windows 3.11 and the swap file. It refuses to create a permanent swap file like the one I was using before, claiming that the drive is not an INT 13h drive. It also won't let me select 32-bit disk or file access, even though the drive is FAT32 formatted. What gives?

FAT32 didn't exist before windows 95, so I don't think FAT32 has anything to do with 32bit disk or file access in windows 3.11.

I use WinNT 351 on my thinkpad 380's with 48mb ram, IBM 3gb HD, Pentium 166mhz.
Works well. I.E. 5.0 Web browser works fine with Vogons forums too.
I use a 3com 3CCFE574BT card.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glV0GlRpo2A

thiccpad

Posting from Opera 3.62 on WFW 3.11.

So far it is very crashy. Barely works. Probably not even as good as Netscape 4.08 - can barely load Vogons without throwing general protection faults.

Refuses to load anything with https either. It is very fast when it does work though.

I might try using the Links browser in DOS text mode.

Here is a thought: what if I had some kind of proxy to help these old browsers along?

I've looked at this here: https://virtuallyfun.com/2014/03/11/web-rende … g-proxy-update/

But I'm not sure how I would set that up.

Edit: also, I'm pretty sure my issues with Netscape and security protocols have to do with TLS, since it has both SSL2 and SSL3.

I'm running into another problem.

Trying to use Outlook Express 5.0 to access Gmail - and it can't send messages. I know this has something to do with SMTP and SSL security (they really want you to use TLS/STARTTLS instead) but in the past I have just enabled "less secure apps access" in my Google account settings and it has worked. That setting is still enabled, yet now when I try this it complains about not being able to establish a secure connection to the server.

I wonder if Google has permanently disabled SSL for Gmail without telling anyone. I would not be surprised.

Make sure you have set the correct date and time.

kixs wrote:

Make sure you have set the correct date and time.

If only it had been this easy - I had accidentally set the time to 4:30 in the morning instead of 4:30 in the afternoon. But fixing it did nothing, OE5 still complains about having no secure connection.

Well, slight change of plans:

This will now be a dual boot system.

I purchased a 16 GB Compact Flash card for use with my CF/IDE adapter. It will have two partitions: one 2 GB FAT16 with DOS 7.1 and Windows 3.1, and one 14 GB FAT32 with Windows 98. This way I can have the best of both worlds; everything I can't do with DOS/Win31 can be done in Windows 98.

I purchased a 64 MB stick of RAM to put in it; hopefully that works. It'll max me out at 96 MB.

It's also a faster CF card so that helps me out.

It had some trouble recognizing the larger drive. I had to install a drive overlay in order to make it work.

One thing I'm not sure how I'll do is boot management. I'm just hoping that when I install Windows 98 on the larger partition, it will boot from that by default and I can use the Windows boot manager to select which one I want.

From what I remember the max ram is 48mb. You can add a 64mb sodim but will only show up as 48mb.
I tried a CF card before but the IBM bios did not like it.

Intel486dx33 wrote:

From what I remember the max ram is 48mb. You can add a 64mb sodim but will only show up as 48mb.

Interesting. It seems to have accepted the RAM with no problem. Except HIMEM.SYS can only see 64MB of it, as usual. The BIOS sees all of it, and I expect Windows 98 will as well.

I had to install a boot manager, and do some tricks to get FDISK to create two primary DOS partitions. Now, having installed DOS on the 2 GB partition, I can install Windows 98 on the 14 GB one. Edit: I just copied the entire contents of the Windows 98 setup CD to a folder called WIN98SE on the large partition.

When booting from each partition, DOS thinks it has the C:\ drive, and thus no problems with drive letters occur. Both Windows 3.1 and Windows 98 will think they have the C:\WINDOWS folder.

Success so far!

I have installed all the drivers, and some software. WiFi works great on Windows 98. Internet browsing is slower than in DOS, using Firefox 2 - no surprise there; much more overhead in Win98. But I have a working email client in Outlook Express 6, although I took a while to figure out how to make it stop downloading every single one of the 13000 messages in my Gmail inbox, in the background. It took long enough to grab the headers.

WiFi speeds seem to be on the order of 100-200 KB/s (not limited by my service! I have 20 mbps currently). I downloaded a 6 MB mp3 file in about 45 seconds, and listened to it with Windows Media Player 9 while the CPU usage seemed to stay very low.

Next order of business will be installing Microsoft Office 2000, and maybe some Windows 98 games.

Suggestions for Win9x games that won’t overly tax a Pentium MMX 233 with 96 MB RAM and a cheap-o laptop video card?

depends on what sort of games you like.

starcraft, c&c tiberian sun, c&c red alert, Unreal tournament 99 in software render mode, quake 2, one of the early need for speed games, halflife 1 in software render mode might work but i would for sure try one of the early versions before all the steam integration.