My Laptop

[Pathos]

I bought a $60NZ (+ $10bag, $15freight) laptop off trademe lately.

P1 100mhz, 24mb ram, 790mb hd, FDD, poor screen, no sound, dead battery, win95, office97.

Spent the first hour fixing the BSOD's, previous user had some software to add a virtual network drive and the driver was crashing because the modem was no longer present.

Deleted a whole lot of shit, cleaned it up, and installed a couple of neat little programs.

FreeCommander (like mc for win)- essential with only a knob mouse
Notepad2 - still my favourite source editor
IE 5 - (only because Notepad2 needed a new version of Shlwapi.dll)
Foxit - pdf reader
Dev-C++ - Ide (with MinGW compiler) Its shit but it works (unlike DJGPP).
Heaps for classic dos games - Triplane Turmoil is the best, plenty of roguelikes.

It works great and is faster than win2000 on the families celeron 2gig with 256 mg ram. (except when i try compile something).

Haven't had any stability problems apart from the one I fixed. I don't know how win95 got such a bad reputation, its probably due to bad drivers giving people grief.

I'm playing around with basic Linux, pretty neat how it works in dos. Don't have a CD rom so can't install anything else. I'm sorry to say I probably wouldn't anyway because the software I've got works fine. I don't think any of the alternatives for this hardware could compare.

Its funny how all these people on the net who are used to the overhead of Xp consider such a machine unusable.

[WMD]

Windows 95 rules.  Well, it did.  Except for System 7.5.

[Pathos]

Microsoft would make so much more money if they made a OS as fast as 95 without a whole lot of bullshit features. Imagine what would happen if everyone with 95&98&nt realised they could upgrade their operating system without losing performance or their beloved substandard operating system.
 
but as the domain name points out....

[piratePenguin]

Microsoft would make so much more money if they made a OS as fast as 95 without a whole lot of bullshit features. Imagine what would happen if everyone with 95&98&nt realised they could upgrade their operating system without losing performance or their beloved substandard operating system.
 
but as the domain name points out....

I don't think they're interested in making a good OS, they don't need to be.

All they need to do is make sure as many people as possible feel the need to use their operating system and to upgrade to the latest versions (and they've been doing a damn good job so far). A "good" release would probably make money-making harder in the future.

All they want is money, not necessarily a good operating system.

[Aloone_Jonez]

Windows 95 was good until you connected to the Internet, then it was almoast impossible to keep malware free without updating the anti-virus. I prefer Windows 2k/XP because they're based on NT so (if you know what you're doing) you can protect yourself to some degree without anti-virus. Personally I wounldn't use any non-Windows NT OS (unless it's non-Windows of course) if I want to connect to the Internet, but in this instance Windows 95 is probably best for you as you wouldn't be able to run all those DOS games.

[Refalm]

Windows 95 was good until you connected to the Internet, then it was almoast impossible to keep malware free without updating the anti-virus. I prefer Windows 2k/XP because they're based on NT so (if you know what you're doing) you can protect yourself to some degree without anti-virus. Personally I wounldn't use any non-Windows NT OS (unless it's non-Windows of course) if I want to connect to the Internet, but in this instance Windows 95 is probably best for you as you wouldn't be able to run all those DOS games.

Nah, just use DOSBox.

[Aloone_Jonez]

DOSBox is often slow, but on a 100mhz? forget it.

[MarathoN]

Nah, just use DOSBox.

Oh please?

I tried to get Tomb Raider 1 working, and it ran like a slideshow. :rolleyes:

I've tried numerous times to get DOSBox working, but it is far too slow. :thumbdwn:

[MarathoN]

Its funny how all these people on the net who are used to the overhead of Xp consider such a machine unusable.

Well, that's hypocritical, because if you tried to run XP on that kind of a machine, it most likely wouldn't work.

I agree with you though, my old system was brilliant on Windows 2000.

the specs were :
AMD K6-2 450MHz Processor
128mb SDRAM
3DFX Voodoo Banshee (until I got a reference Nvidia Geforce 2 MX/400 64mb)
Creative Ensoniq Soundcard (which I still have )
8GB IBM Hard Disc
350W Power Supply

I dislike XP, mainly because of the issues with speed, Windows 2000 is a LOT faster, and doesn't need the maintenance to keep it running fast (in my experience with it)

[Aloone_Jonez]

The reason why it's so slow is because it retardidly emulates 86x hardware which is fair enough if you're running it on a Mac but is pointless on an 86x when all you need is a virtual machine like Vmware or MS virtual machine.

What OS are you running?

You could try DOSEmu which in fact (despite its name) isn't an emulator, it's a virtual machine running FreeDOS but it's UNIX only.

[MarathoN]

Yeah I run a dualboot of Win2k and Slackware 10.2.

I tried FreeDOS before I re-installed Linux, and it wouldn't boot.

That was the fault of Windows, it rips your MBR up. :thumbdwn:

[WMD]

Oh please?
I tried to get Tomb Raider 1 working, and it ran like a slideshow. :rolleyes:

Tomb Raider 1 is too intense for DOSBox.  It works great with OLD games though.  Tomb Raider is not an old game.

[Aloone_Jonez]

Marathon,
Try a boot disk or CD and add a FAT32 partition, alternativly get a cheap and nasty old 1GB hard drive and install it on that.

[MarathoN]

Marathon,
Try a boot disk or CD and add a FAT32 partition, alternativly get a cheap and nasty old 1GB hard drive and install it on that.

I have two partitions on Windows, one is NTFS and one is FAT32.

When I installed FreeDOS, it wouldn't boot but the directory was there (on my FAT32 partition). :p

[Aloone_Jonez]

Did you try a boot disc or running it from a CD?