I'll start with the beginning. I have a Pentium MMX, 233mHz, 96 mb RAM. It came preloaded with Win95 and other things, when I bought it in Jan 98. Despite everything else the machine has been somewhat stable. It has never corrupted files or anything that would cause me to reload Windows.
That was part of the problem.
I recently received my copy of Mandrake/Linux 8.2, four CDs including OpenOffice, $7 including shipping. I saved everything I thought relevent, cleaned up the primary hard drive, made my boot floppy and went to town.
I planned on making a dual boot setup but, when it got to the point of partitioning the hard drive it couldn't do that. It said it could not use the unused portion of the drive. I ran through the options, which added up to all or nothing, I was in too far to quit and go home. So, I took the entire drive and did it up.
Mandrake installed just fine and seemed to work. It said my sound card was crap, I agreed. It could not find my modem! I jumped through hoops and ran in circles, it still couldn't find the modem. Not knowing Linux in the least I couldn't find my other two hard drives either. They were there, I just couldn't access them. Eventually, I yanked a modem from another computer I have, Mandrake couldn't see it either! I tried everything I could think of, pushed every button on the screen, no modem.
After two days of this I decided to punt. Go back to Win95, do some more research then try again when I was a little better armed.
The driver I kept for my CD-ROM drive would not work... Eventually I installed another CD drive and got that to work. Reformatted the hard drive and got Windows loaded. Windows couldn't find the modem either!
After a day of working on it, I found the root of the problem:
Winmodem
Winvideo
Winaudio
WinCD-ROM drive
The video card can stand alone but, really wants/needs it's WinDrivers. The audio card is crap without it's WinDrivers. Linux was able to use the CD-ROM drive and use it (32x Toshiba w/ IDE interface), without it's WinDrivers DOS and Windows can't use it. The Winmodem can't even be see by Windows unless it's WinDrivers are loaded. None of the above revelations are documented with my machine and I have all the manuals. They allude to everything being standard hardware.
So, after I get a modem, an audio card and a CD-RW to put in this ol'puter, it will have to stay a Win95 box. Maybe I'll pick up a used or refurbished box, sans OS, and run up my copy of Mandrake on that instead.
