First post, by The yellow M
Hello!
I've got a load of questions that revolve around playing old Windows 95/98 and DOS games on a new notebook that currently only has Vista installed.
I'm not sure if all these questions are in the right place here; if you can point me to another forum or a site with information about these things, please do.
Until now I used an old P4 PC with XP and Win98SE as Boot options, which I set up using the freeware program Ranish Partition Manager.
Now I bought a Toshiba P200-135 Notebook that has:
Windows Vista Home Premium (OEM Recovery)
Intel Core 2 Duo T5500
Intel 945 PM, ICH7-M Motherboard chipset
Nvidia Geforce 7600
2 GB RAM
160 GB HD in 2 Partitions, "Vista" and "Data" (empty), and, according to the manual, another hidden 1,5 GB System Recovery Partition.
What I imagine I'd like to do is setting up 4 Partitions with:
1. The current Vista installation - for installing new games (those with obnoxious copy protection).
2. XP SP2 - for everyday use, most old Windows games, and using DOSBOX.
3. Win98SE - for Windows games that won't run on XP, DOS games too if possible.
4. Some kind of Linux.
5. And keeping the hidden System Recovery Partition for Vista.
Now the questions:
1. Which program to use for the partitioning process? Is Paragon Partition Manager alright, for example?
Is this process even safe? I'm much more hesitant than that last time I partitioned a harddrive, as I have no experience with notebooks and Vista.
2. Will the fresh XP installation feature all the Toshiba notebook features that I see in the current Vista installation? For example, when holding down the function key (or putting the cursor at the top of the screen), there's a row of images scrolling down from the top of the screen, showing the keyboard combinations (to adjust the brightness etc.). It looks like a Vista widget to me. You can click on them too. And using these keyboard shortcuts only works after holding down the function key some time to allow the images to appear.
I checked on the Toshiba driver downloads page, and they've got a lot of things both for XP and Vista, such as a "Hotkey utility", whose description only partly fits to what I'd need. Does anyone have experience setting up a fresh notebook OS?
3. After all the 4 OS's are set up, I'd like to write a complete HD image to DVDs; which program should I use? (Paragon Drive Backup?) Should I actually do this before I start, to be safe?
4. Is it even possible to run Win98 on this hardware? E.g. I checked for drivers for the Intel Motherboard chipset, and it seems that they provided drivers for 98SE up to 2004, so this chipset is out of those old drivers' range? There seem to be no 98SE drivers for the Geforce 7600 either.
Or will everything sufficiently work with generic drivers from the Win98 disc? Are there drivers from a third party that would work?
What about those notebook features like function keyboard combinations, again? Toshiba doesn't provide anything for Win98.
5. I've read only a little bit about QEMU, VMWare and Virtual PC, and never used them yet. Should I emulate Win98 with one of those instead? Will the performance be OK? What about drivers in this case?
6. Is it even a good approach to try to run Win98? Or will XP with the Application Compatibility Toolkit (never used that yet, either) be fine for windows games?
7. I know nothing about Linux. 😀 I'd like to install a lowest-common-denominator, hassle-free version, which I can use to install Linux games on. Which Linux distribution do you recommend?
I'm grateful for any tips!