Subj : My Retro Computing To : ALL From : Elf Date : Sat Aug 07 2021 09:34:00 So I have been having fun with revisiting old software that I use to run in the 1990's. I had the good fortune of inheriting a Dell Dimension 3000 from my son-in-law. They had it lying around and were not using it any more. It was running Windows XP. After removing the photos from the hard drive and giving them to my son-in-law he said I could do whatever I wanted with the computer. So, I erased the hard drive and installed Windows 98SE. That was the beginning of my journey back to the 90's. :-) When all is said and done, I probably ended up installing Windows 98SE 20 or 30 times. I had to figure out the right way to get it all running on a computer that was originally designed to run Windows XP and not 98. I was about to give up hope because I could not get the video and sound working properly because there were no standard Windows 98 drivers from Dell for this computer. Then I remembered . . . Back in the day in that scenario I would just REPLACE the video card with my own card that DID have drivers for Windows 98 and I would do the same for the sound card. So, I had on the shelf a Soundblaster 16 PCI card that I had purchased last year with the intent of building a retro PC. So, I installed that and the accompanying Windows 98 drivers. Sound is all good except for DOS games that seem to be missing some sound effects. I think the ultimate solution for that will be replacing this card with a different PCI card (there are no ISA slots in this PC, which would be ideal for DOS games). I have done some research online and it sounds like the best PCI card to get better DOS compatibility may be the Soundblaster Live 5.1 PCI card. I'm in no rush and will investigate further on that matter over time. For the video card I purchased a GeForce FX 5500 with 256MB of memory on ebay after I first found the drivers for it online for Windows 98. Installed and working GREAT! It is a 3D card and has no problems with games - though I'll admit I'm not a heavy gamer. The main problem I had was trying to find motherboard drivers. I thought I found them in Intel's driver batch but they ended up causing more problems and so on my final installation I just did not install them and I see no difference. Everything seems fine so far. The other problem I had was conflicts between "the system" and the video and sound card. Through some troubleshooting I ended up finding out it was due to the way the system managed power - I think the ACPI settings were taking precendence and taking interrupts that were required by the video and/or sound card. The ultimate solution ended up being to install Windows 98 *without* power management - which is fine with me because it never did it well any way. Remember your Windows 98 computer going to sleep only to never wake up again? So the secret switch I found to run the Windows 98SE setup program was: setup /p i Now the system was stable . . . or so I thought. Weird problems started cropping up. Turned out the hard drive had a bad sector or two. It was failing. Solution? I had a 220GB SSD sitting on my desk begging for a purpose. I purchased a $20 IDE to SATA adapter and reinstalled Windows 98SE yet again. Now we're done!! Doing great. Fast startups, of course I'm sure there is some bottleneck between the speed of the SSD and the speed at which the IDE controllers can operate, but it's still noticably faster than a HDD and more reliable. I split the SSD into two partitions (128GB is the max for Windows 98). So I do Ghost backups to the second partition. Yes, I know if the drive itself fails I'll lose my backup, but the point of the backup is to have a quick way to go back in time if I screw up the system too much. :-) If I lose the drive altogether, well, I can reinstall everything. I have notes on how to install and what to install and in what order. One last problem I had was with the network card. It would sometimes not connect upon reboot. I think I have it worked out by configuring the card to a set speed instead of "Auto". Seems to be more stable now. It's just an SMC ethernet card. I will probably buy a replacement to have on hand just in case. Will need to be PCI of course.. So, with that adventure, I am now typing this message on my Windows 98SE computer using BlueWave 2.3 for DOS and Procomm Plus 3.0 for great BBS connectivity with full ANSI support. I also have installed one of my favorite programs for building web sites back in the 90's - NetObjects Fusion. I went ahead and built two sites. One is my 1990's website with downloads to some Windows 98/DOS software I find useful as well as a little information on BBSing. The other kind of chronicles my journey in computing from my Apple IIe days through DOS, Windows, Mac and Linux. Both sites do not require SSL and are viewable the same from Windows 3.1 with Internet Explorer 5.0 to today's modern browsers on modern OS's. This is fun and these sites are just meant for fun. Hope you enjoy them if you decide to visit. http://lifeseven.com/1990s http://lifeseven.com/retrointerests .... Klingon DOS 6.0- DEL.COM; ERASE.COM; WIPE.COM; TRASH.EXE; BURN.BAT; ___ Blue Wave/386 v2.30 --- SBBSecho 3.14-Win32 * Origin: Diamond Mine Online BBS 21:1/194 bbs.dmine.net:24 (21:1/194) .