Something like this:
https://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=127074

Oooh, nice. I've thought about Windows 2000. I'm not sure - wasn't it the first PnP NT-based OS?

The machine I'm buying has 320 MB of RAM but I'm thinking about upgrading to the full 512 MB. It's PC-100 on a 440BX. Processor is PIII 700 MHz.

The graphics card might be a bottleneck. It's an ATI Rage Mobility, either 4 MB or 8 MB - not sure which.

The machine will be a combo games/productivity thing. I want to be able to put it in my backpack, go about my day to day business, not worry too much about the battery, have WiFi or ethernet connectivity - perhaps, to save battery power and for faster network operation, come up with some kind of WiFi bridge with a Raspberry Pi connected to my phone's WiFi hotspot and providing ethernet internet access to the Thinkpad. The SSD will also help battery life significantly, I think, and reduce weight.

Part of the reason I got this machine was because it was one of the last to be made with DOS compatibility and floppy and CD drive all in one unit. Also, the seller has replaced the battery recently.

I can use the floppy drive to transfer files back and forth between the Thinkpad and my Toshiba DOS laptop.

keenmaster486 wrote:

I can use the floppy drive to transfer files back and forth between the Thinkpad and my Toshiba DOS laptop.

why not use Intersvr/Interlnk or good old LapLink?

keenmaster486 wrote:

... I want to be able to put it in my backpack, go about my day to day business, ...

If you'll actually be able to do that, then I admire your physical fitness. :p I don't know about the A20m but my A30 weighs ~3.30kg (with battery in and only the DVD drive) and I just can't realistically imagine toting that massive thing everywhere. Also, swapping the HDD for an SSD will make zero palpable difference to the weight, I can guarantee you.

Yeah, people have gone soft. 😀 Back in the day, no one would complain about lugging those 3kg+ monstrosities around, because, well, there was no alternative. Heck, my first personal laptop was a 2.5kg Compaq Evo, and the second a 2.7kg Thinkpad T42 (15"), and I lugged them both happily (though, obviously, not at the same time). Now I wouldn't want to carry a machine like this anymore.

The 14" T42 was pretty thin for its time.

But it did not have the ALMIGHTY IPS FLEXVIEW SCREEN!

BAN OP

I've toted around my Thinkpad 385XD before. Not ideal, but it worked.

keenmaster486 wrote:

Well, I ordered myself an IBM Thinkpad A20m on eBay, and put my old Thinkpad up for sale, due to the fact that my battery rebuil […]
Show full quote

Well, I ordered myself an IBM Thinkpad A20m on eBay, and put my old Thinkpad up for sale, due to the fact that my battery rebuild kind of flopped and I'm consolidating my DOS/Win3.x experience in my Toshiba 460CDT, which has a new battery already. More on that in a different thread, probably.

So what should I do with the A20m? I have a 64 GB PATA SSD which I intend to put in it, and partition it up to my liking with some kind of multiple boot system.

One of the partitions will be a 2 GB FAT16 job with DOS and Windows 3.1 just for kicks. Hopefully the ATI drivers here: http://www.win31.de/edrivers.htm will work for the video card.

One of the partitions will also be Windows 98 SE, my standard configuration.

But I have 64 GB to work with here! Think of the possibilities! This machine can probably run a LOT of different OS's. I'm open to suggestions.

How about reverting it back to stock configuration again?
https://www.cnet.com/products/ibm-thinkpad-a2 … -gb-hdd-series/

Hmm, I don't think I'd do stock config. I definitely want to use this SSD in it, which opens up all the possibilities for dual boot configs.

Maybe I don't even want to run anything NT-based on it. Or maybe I don't even want dual boot... maybe I just want full 98SE on the entire 64 GB. Geez, I can't make up my mind.

Here is an update! I received the laptop. Posting from it now.

I ended up ditching the idea of using Windows 2000 at all. For some reason it just seems like this machine needs to live solidly in the pre-2000 era. So I've installed DOS 7.1 in a 2 GB FAT16 partition, and Windows 98 SE in the remaining 58 GB (the drive is 60 GB... marketed as 64, but whatever).

As a first-time experiment, I ran the "Revenge of Mozilla" utility to remove all IE shell integration. It worked quite well... all I had to do afterwards was revert the hideous custom logos it added to the bootup and shutdown. And now I have a snappy shell in my Windows 98 SE installation.

I have a nice PCMCIA 54 mbps WiFi card... one which only sticks out about a half inch from the side of the machine,which is nice! Most cards stick out at least an inch and a half, and I constantly worry about whether or not I will move my hand in the wrong direction or something and break off the card. The WiFi works great! No WPA2, of course. I have a Linksys card that can do WPA2 in 98SE but the install utility demanded I install IE 5.5. No can do!

I'm posting this from the custom RetroZilla 2.1 with TLS 1.2 encryption. So far so good; seems to work fine, although it's obviously much slower than something like Netscape 3. At idle I'm seeing 50-70 MB RAM usage... with the browser loaded it moves to 150 MB-ish. The Pentium III saves its butt somewhat. It'll work for now. It's actually much closer to what I used during my childhood, though - as a result, Vogons feels VERY nostalgic on this machine.

I have discovered that the video card does have 8 MB of RAM, which is nice! These units had either 4 MB or 8 MB, and I was really hoping that this one had the greater amount.

The sound card works, also in DOS, though with the OPL3 issues I anticipated. It's fine; this machine is only meant for casual DOS gaming, if that. I also could get used to the buttons to change the sound volume, as they seem to do it in hardware rather than making a call to the OS, but I do disagree with it from a design standpoint 🤣

Overall the machine is CLEAN. Little to no scratches. The seller was the original owner, and obviously took good care of it.

I haven't tried the battery yet. Hopefully it does indeed hold a charge. For how long will be the question.

I'll post pictures tomorrow.

keenmaster486 wrote:

So I've installed DOS 7.1 in a 2 GB FAT16 partition, and Windows 98 SE in the remaining 58 GB (the drive is 60 GB... marketed as 64, but whatever).

Good God! Why does everyone who want to get into DOS gaming has to start with some stupid pointless dual-boot idiocy? 😕

You want to tell me that you're actually dual-booting Win98 (because that's what "DOS 7.1" is) with Win98? I hope I misunderstood.

keenmaster486 wrote:

I have a Linksys card that can do WPA2 in 98SE but the install utility demanded I install IE 5.5. No can do!

Ralink-based cards can do WPA2 in Win98, and you don't need to install any crap (just the drivers and the control software). If your card is based on Ralink RT61 chipset, you could use the drivers mentioned in this post:
https://cloakedthargoid.wordpress.com/win9x-wpa2/

dr_st wrote:

Good God! Why does everyone who want to get into DOS gaming has to start with some stupid pointless dual-boot idiocy? 😕

I've been there. The appeal of trying to build that one single computer that boots and runs every single OS and game perfectly makes you do stupid things. Then you go the exact opposite stupid route and end up with hundreds of decades old cards and stuff.

dr_st wrote:

Good God! Why does everyone who want to get into DOS gaming has to start with some stupid pointless dual-boot idiocy? 😕

You want to tell me that you're actually dual-booting Win98 (because that's what "DOS 7.1" is) with Win98? I hope I misunderstood.

Excuse me... I have been DOS gaming and administrating Windows 98 for over a decade now and I have my reasons. My plan is to install Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on that partition as well. By using two partitions, the DOS/Win3.x one can have a boot menu configured specifically for DOS gaming, and I don't have to deal with Windows 98 encroaching on what I'm trying to do in DOS. This also allows me to configure Windows 98 MS-DOS mode without messing up my DOS configs. I like to keep my retro machines with a "pure DOS" option that is NOT Win9x MS-DOS mode. In addition, I am a programmer and when working on DOS applications I'm writing, I like to work in a pure DOS environment as well. Keeping that separate from the 9x partition is my usual way of doing things. All of my DOS games are also stored on this partition and I can run them either in pure DOS or in 9x.

I could theoretically just have a boot menu in CONFIG.SYS on the Windows 98 partition, but for me that would defeat the purpose - I like to keep my OS's clean and separated. Plus I wouldn't be able to install Windows 3.x that way (it detects when the "special" Windows 98 DOS is loaded and refuses to run... I have to use the China DOS Union version. Have had many headaches with this in the past). Also, I would run DOS 5.0 or 6.22 on the 2 GB partition instead, but I want to be able to access files on the large partition. Yes, I know "MS-DOS 7.1" was never an actual released version and is just the DOS that shipped with Windows 9x.

Another advantage of doing it this way is that there is always something to fall back on if Win9x fails at some point, and I can reformat the 9x partition with impunity without messing up my pure DOS install. The boot manager I'm using installs itself into the MBR and would not be affected by Windows 9x crashing and burning.

dr_st wrote:

Ralink-based cards can do WPA2 in Win98, and you don't need to install any crap (just the drivers and the control software). If your card is based on Ralink RT61 chipset, you could use the drivers mentioned in this post:
https://cloakedthargoid.wordpress.com/win9x-wpa2/

Ah, very interesting! This could be useful. My card is a Linksys WPC54G; I don't know whether it's using the Ralink chip but I can do some research and find out.

keenmaster486 wrote:

My plan is to install Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on that partition as well.

Ah, that! It seems that this is a very common answer I get when I ask "WHY???!!!" I am beginning to suspect that people want to install the useless crap that Win 3.11 is (on any PC over a Pentium) just so that they can have a "legitimate reason" to that dual-boot nonsense. 😁 But in that case, why didn't you install DOS 6.22? Ah, well, you answered that below. 🤣

keenmaster486 wrote:

I like to keep my retro machines with a "pure DOS" option that is NOT Win9x MS-DOS mode.

There is no reason in the world to do this; it's just a waste of time and effort.

keenmaster486 wrote:

I could theoretically just have a boot menu in CONFIG.SYS on the Windows 98 partition, but for me that would defeat the purpose - I like to keep my OS's clean and separated.

No, you could just have Win98 always boot to DOS with all the needed DOS stuff configured in the startup files, and then you could just launch the GUI when you wanted to, by typing WIN. You know, kinda like Win 3.11 works. But I guess it's just better to have a genuine Win 3.11. If you can get it to run. 😉

keenmaster486 wrote:

Another advantage of doing it this way is that there is always something to fall back on if Win9x fails at some point, and I can reformat the 9x partition with impunity without messing up my pure DOS install.

This again has little value. The DOS portion of Win98 never fails. Or at least it fails as often as DOS 6.22 or your special "China DOS" do.

But hey, it's your PC. Do whatever you want. 😀

install windows 10 on it

oeuvre wrote:

install windows 10 on it

A struggle ensues. The CPU cooler loses.

It seems that my Linksys WPC54G has a Broadcom BCM4318 chip in it. I don't know whether that is something I can find manufacturer or generic drivers for Windows 98SE for, let alone a configuration utility. I'll do some searching around.