Windows 98 Rocks!

[greenday]

Okay...so you guys saw a link from me to a computer forum I participate on...

Well I recently acquired a Dell Dimension 4100 with Windows 98 SE. It's got a 10GB HDD, 256MB RAM, and a good 'ol Pentium 3 clocked at 866mhz. Well no one had any faith in me that I could get this thing operational...Pretty much everyone including even my uncle thought it was a waste of time. (not money, I got the pc in trade, and only have $27 or so in it) But I seem to have proved them wrong lol. I'm on the PC right now running Opera with Youtube and this site. Runs fine...It struggles with a lot, but thats to be expected of a 12 year old pc. And those who mess with win98se will know it has a terrinle driver support. So everything and I mean everything has to be installed by disc. But thats okay with me, a $27 internet capable pc (minus the gc game and controller i traded for it) Is fine by me! Oh, and the $27 was in a MSI Turbo G Wireless Network Card. It works great, and was super easy to install. My plans after that are to get a laptop to desktop hdd cable and another stick of Ram. Im not going to sink money into this by any means, but man I'm amazed that 12 yrd old technology is still useable. So don't pass up windows 98!!

I will upload pics asap. I have to do a few more updates so I can Use Fotki and whatnot.

questions/comments/concerns veyr much welcome!

[TheB1GDude]

I would go crazy and upgrade it to Windows ME, despite the reputation it gained for being crash happy I ran it for many many years and found it to be much better than 98SE

[mycrors4]

na, i think windows 95 was the best, there really was nothing wrong with it, but still, 98 was infact pretty awesome aswell

[reaper]

niice work fella

to be honest i still use win2000 on the old pc i do most of my stuff on , i have an xp netbook a vista laptop a windows 7 pc and an xp PC

but i like the format of win2000 it isnt always trying to do stuff "to make your life easyer"

[deckerz]

Originally Posted by mycrors4

na, i think windows 95 was the best, there really was nothing wrong with it, but still, 98 was infact pretty awesome aswell

+1

Looking back i can't really think of anything that was wrong with 95 lol.

I never used 98, went to windows ME then XP and now im on win 7.

[maxinflixion]

I have rescued many an old machine around this age. I have found that a quick (nothing is quick on a P3) install of a lightweight Linux does the trick.

It's funny, but sometimes tinkering with old hardware and getting it to work is more fun than using a brand new PC.

[taiwanesekid05]

I used to have a Windows 98 computer... I mostly remember playing Lego Island and Backyard Baseball on it. It was state of the art with a 10 GB hard drive and cost $2000

[greenday]

Well guys I did some more downloading and updating/whatnot. I was going to buy the parts I mentioned today but I didn't get around to it...oh well. I've noticed win98se is not as rock solid as I had said it was...matter of fact it's actually quite buggy...hmm. Well anyways, I got pics, I had to jump thru hoops to get them...photobucket wont let me open the "upload" button, (so I had to upload to fb and url them over) and Opera is a tad unreliable...oh well...pics:

[greenday]

Originally Posted by maxinflixion

I have rescued many an old machine around this age. I have found that a quick (nothing is quick on a P3) install of a lightweight Linux does the trick.

It's funny, but sometimes tinkering with old hardware and getting it to work is more fun than using a brand new PC.

I apologize for the 2x post, but I really do agree with you...I would install Puppy but I'm scared to to be perfectly honest...I might try and burn an iso cd later on and use that. I hear a lot about how Puppy or OS's of that sort kind of breathe new life into pretty much dead pc's. I tried to install it to another pc and found out the disc drive was bad...and I couldn't boot from the usb properly either so I got discouraged....but im thinking I might try it here soon, IDK. but thanks.

[maxinflixion]

Originally Posted by greenday

I apologize for the 2x post, but I really do agree with you...I would install Puppy but I'm scared to to be perfectly honest...I might try and burn an iso cd later on and use that. I hear a lot about how Puppy or OS's of that sort kind of breathe new life into pretty much dead pc's. I tried to install it to another pc and found out the disc drive was bad...and I couldn't boot from the usb properly either so I got discouraged....but im thinking I might try it here soon, IDK. but thanks.

Puppy isn't bad, but it's really less intuitive than many others. The prize winner in lightweight and cool is definitely Crunchbang Linux. It's got everything you need and runs a real lightweight window manager.

Try it if you have time. Your only issue is w/ a machine like that, you may not have enough RAM for a Live CD (Live CD's run in RAM and generally want 512mb to run decently), so doing a full install (won't take long even on such hardware) is your better option.

You'll have fully supported software in Linux rather than running legacy software on Win 98.

PM me if you need or want any help with this should you decide to try it.

[ravevolution]

My 1st PC came with Windows 3.11 then later upgraded to 95. Later on I got a PC my uncle had found from one of his former tenants at his duplex with '98 which served me well until I finally got something more current. For a time I tried ME and I thought it was kinda buggy. ATM I'm using Vista premium and maybe, not sure will go with Windows 7, since I hear good things bout it (its what Vista was suppose to be)

[EagleTalons]

My first PC had Windows ME on it. It was decent. For sim city games and such. I used it until about 3 years ago when something happened while I was adding a PCI video card. I bought a Slimline with Vista. Was a terrible buy. The motherboard finally gave up the ghost on it.

I reused the HDD and CPU off of the slimline on a new computer I built. Never again will I buy a desktop. So easy to make. It runs on Windows 7 now. Gave it to my dad since he really wanted a computer of his own.

I am using a Alienware M17 Laptop with Windows 7. The SSD makes it startup and bring up large files so fast!

[FinalGear]

Win98....the memories

[Howlsatmoonlight]

Man I feel old, I remember doing programming on the Commodore 64, and my first real PC was a 486 running DOS. And all you kiddies that love the internet, I remember back when the 'internet' was nothing more than connecting to different Bulletin Board Services, which meant if you wanted to go to CompUSA's website, you had to direct dial them on your 2400 modem, and dial a new number to connect to the next site :P

[mycrors4]

lol my first comp had Windows 98... oh i miss those virus infected days... before we sold it, we cleaned it up... 403 trojan and malware viruses 0.o and it would still work fine. and was quite fast o.o

[ravevolution]

Originally Posted by Howlsatmoonlight

Man I feel old, I remember doing programming on the Commodore 64, and my first real PC was a 486 running DOS. And all you kiddies that love the internet, I remember back when the 'internet' was nothing more than connecting to different Bulletin Board Services, which meant if you wanted to go to CompUSA's website, you had to direct dial them on your 2400 modem, and dial a new number to connect to the next site :P

I hear ya lol, my 1st PC with windows 3.11 was a 486 w/ DOS, HD was like 320mb's (yes you heard right) A complete ancient compared to now days Ahh the days of dial up modem tones.

[greenday]

Well guys I got my parts ordered. I wasted my money and time on a Vanilla Card Mastercard and I'm almost sick over what a load of crap it is...I spent $25 plus $3.95 on it. (I spent a little more on some other things I needed) (I probably would have had better luck with a Visa they had, but...idk) And eBay continuosly declined it, not to mention it took $4 from me for no reason! So I use my uncles and pay him cash. I read up on the card info and you can't use it in ATMs. So I won't be seeing the cash again. I go back to where I bought it to use it there and apparently need a PIN number that I was never informed of. So thats how I lost pretty much all of my $55 earned detailing the first few cars of the season. Thank you MasterCard. But anyways. Got another 256mb RAM and a nice kit so I can use my old Laptop's HDD and get the data off of it and use it for storage. The one I bought includes rails for a permeanant mount, so I'll have about 20 more GBs of storage. Hooray!

[greenday]

Sorry for the 2x post, but I got my parts in today. The HDD cable adapter was a bit of a fuss because of my own stupidity, and the RAM didn't come till late because of a post office mixup...but aside from all that I got it all working like I'd like except I'm still having problems with loading here and there. I think I'm going to Ubuntu...this legacy stuff is too annoying.

[texan_idiot25]

I have had two computers with just regular 98 (one an obsolete office computer, one found on the side of the road) and they both had no problem using my wireless keyboard/mouse and monitor. Both had ethernet ports and connected to our DSL with no issue, and once flash was updated ran most all of the web pretty fine on oldschool IE! Even had one running an earlier version of firefox. Slow as hell, but stable.

10gb hard drive on one, oh how did we survive?

I still find it funny that my brand new laptop has a dial up modem and phone line port.

[greenday]

Small update...I experimented with Puppy for a bit then finally burnt a good disc in Windows 98 to boot Ubuntu...pretty satisfied aside from the printer I have is apparently not compatible...or perhaps it is I just haven't figured it out yet. But anyways...also got an LG Super Multi DVD drive...but when it came I found it had SATA connectors so now I have to buy some adapters...but still, only $68 or so in this thing!