Personally I prefer Win7 over WinXP, as the operating system on a productivity computer.
Things like working with SQL and Visual studio is much less painfull.

For fun (or should I say retro computing), nothing past Win98SE makes sence.
MS-Dos-6.22 is nice too, not win311 though.

Today, I refurbished an old GF2-MX400, by cleaning off dust and mounted a new fan.
Had fun, figuring out other screws and such.... 😁 (yes, it was fun, not being sarcastic here)

King_Corduroy wrote:

It would be nice if MS allowed for installations of different Desktop environments like Linux does. But then again they would either have to allow for people to have access to their code OR spend a lot of dev time building all these other DEs.

Nothing keeps developers from making alternate shells... It is just that it is hard to compete with Explorer.exe and it becomes a very niche product, since most people looking for alternate desktop environments probably play arround with Linux. Back in the 9x era there were stuff like Litestep and Talisman that completly replaced Explorer.exe as a shell, but most (if not all of them) died out a slow and silent death.

Ten years later;

I have finally fixed the hard drive... I have installed a 4GB CF Card, interestingly, it is possible to see all 4GB but this is unreliable so I limited it to 500MB, it was the only card I had.

It's not entirely reliable still, I think the card is a bit knackered to be honest. It's great to have this thing back, I used to lump it into work all the time to configure switches and routers (Via serial) because their Sempron/P4 TravelMate's and ThinkPad's were bullshit. I was very sad when it stopped working.

I ran it for a solid 45 minutes on battery today before the alarm went off! I also backed up the BIOS in case I ever need it.

A few weeks ago, I found one of these just sitting on a shelf at a Goodwill store in Omaha:

An Amstrad PPC640 portable computer. It's in rough physical condition, but it works!

Today, just for the heck of it, I tried to see if my parallel port Zip drive would work on it, and indeed it did! Not only did it work, but I noticed that it would mount as drive C:. This got the gears turning.

First, I created a special boot floppy whose sole purpose in life is to mount the Zip drive, then pass control of DOS over to it.

After I got this working, I went ahead and began using the Zip drive as a sort of fake hard drive. This was the end result:

Yes, that's Windows 3.0 running on an Amstrad PPC640 computer from a parallel port Iomega Zip drive. It's slower than a constipated sloth swimming in molasses, but it works!

Very nice... and very cool.

I wonder if you could get one of those old parallel port NIC's like an old Xircom to work on it. Or since you use a Zip on the parallel port, get the expansion port to work for a real NIC:

Wikipedia wrote:

All the signals used by the 8-bit ISA bus were also available through an expansion connector.

torindkflt wrote:

Yes, that's Windows 3.0 running on an Amstrad PPC640 computer from a parallel port Iomega Zip drive. It's slower than a constipated sloth swimming in molasses, but it works!

Oh my god...

Your Blue Screen Of Death can come with a Click Of Death! 😁

QBiN wrote:

I wonder if you could get one of those old parallel port NIC's like an old Xircom to work on it.]

Curious to know if one of those would work with the Zip drive's passthrough port. Maybe something to investigate in the future, if I ever do manage to acquire a Xircom adapter.

What is this? A competition to see who can run the puniest portable?

Nah, just kidding. That's pretty awesome, if you ever do experiment with an Ethernet adapter keep us posted. Maybe you could test a printer now and find out if it has a negative effect on the Zip drive? If it doesn't, chase after one of those Ethernet Adapters.

Used to have one of those portable amstrads - god the screen is horrible! - think original gameboy. Funny knowing how many batteries it would eat if you actually wanted to use it "on the road".

One curiosity about it is that it was used in Red Dwarf as a prop.

I have tested my newly aquired Sound Blaster AWE64 Value Edition in my P133 rig.
Came to this conclusion...

Originally the P133 had a SB16 + GUS-ACE installed, and I am using this machine for MS-Dos-6.22 only.
With the AWE64, I tested a couple of games out, and I must say that I am not really happy 100%

Old games are prone to use Adlib, wich of course the AWE64 does not have.
The Wavetable sounds much alike the one that are found on my AWE32 CT3900.
And the GUS-ACE does a terrible job at emulating Adlib. Just as bad as the AWE64 in my ears.
Not happy at all with Adlib emulaton. The real deal is still the best.

My personal preferrance for an sound system for pre-95 Dos games are AWE32 and a GUS-ACE.
Dos-games from 95 to 99, both the AWE32 and the AWE64 wins equally.
Still fun to test the AWE64 Value out. Clearly great for Blood, Doom2 and Duke3D.
The AWE64 just plain sucks for games like Dynablaster.... Almost made my ears bleed. 😁
(and yeah.... The P133 is back running SB16 and GUS-ACE. Ahhhh.... Much better)

torindkflt wrote:

QBiN wrote:

I wonder if you could get one of those old parallel port NIC's like an old Xircom to work on it.]

Curious to know if one of those would work with the Zip drive's passthrough port. Maybe something to investigate in the future, if I ever do manage to acquire a Xircom adapter.

Yes it will work http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showt … 60-via-Ethernet

If it has the facilty to fit a nic -ie horizontal ISA slots that would be a better option though.

Nice find. I hope you have fun with it.

CDs turned up today to add to my OS collection. The half hidden CD is Internet Exploder 5.0.
Came with some old MSCE exam prep books which will go out for recycling.

I gave my P166 machine (Pentium 166MMX tower of power) a little upgrade recently (or side-grade, or down-grade, depending how you look at it). It recieved a nice new AT PSU - and not just new old stock, I'm under the impression that these StarTechs are still being made.

And I tossed the SB16 + XR385 + SCC1 sound setup and replaced it with a humble AWE64 Value + Simmcon + 32MB RAM. I've never really bonded with the SCC1, I think it knows that it's too good for me. The AWE64 Value however is like an old pair of tracksuit pants - comfortable, easy to use, and gets the job done. I haven't explored the wonderful world of sound fonts much yet, but even the Creative supplied 4MB font (I used the AWE64 Gold installation package) sounds very freaking good, I think.

badmojo wrote:

I gave my P166 machine (Pentium 166MMX tower of power) a little upgrade recently (or side-grade, or down-grade, depending how you look at it). It recieved a nice new AT PSU - and not just new old stock, I'm under the impression that these StarTechs are still being made.

And I tossed the SB16 + XR385 + SCC1 sound setup and replaced it with a humble AWE64 Value + Simmcon + 32MB RAM. I've never really bonded with the SCC1, I think it knows that it's too good for me. The AWE64 Value however is like an old pair of tracksuit pants - comfortable, easy to use, and gets the job done. I haven't explored the wonderful world of sound fonts much yet, but even the Creative supplied 4MB font (I used the AWE64 Gold installation package) sounds very freaking good, I think.

Looks wicked!

You changed your monitor, why did you change your monitor? 😲

P.S. I've been casually playing GTAIII for a long period now, 1-2 hours a day when I can and for the first time I'm close to completing it. 96% now and slowly moving towards 100% 😀 I only use wa;kthroughs to know how many packages/rampages/jumps there are on each island, so no cheating there 😀

I actually found 99 packages on GTAIII legitimately by just playing and without walkthrough or such.. I never did find that 100th one.. 😒

Trying to figure out why Intels chipset drivers, after installation, decide to not play nice (or at all) with every flash drive I throw at it...

On an unrelated note, anyone here know a non-USB method to get files to a Northwood box?

I used to like using flash drives on my Win98 box... until I configured my network correctly. Now I do all my file-moving through my network. It is even easier on my A64 XP box.

alexanrs wrote:

I used to like using flash drives on my Win98 box... until I configured my network correctly. Now I do all my file-moving through my network. It is even easier on my A64 XP box.

Network drivers? Oh, you mean those things I wanted to install after Intel's chipset drivers using my.. oh wait.

Please just let there be a way to fix this without having to reinstall XP yet again.

Just burn the drivers in a CD... or, given how small NIC drivers are, even a floppy should be enough

Nice computer badmojo! Love the case. 😁