Kind of like a laptop...

[digitalwanderer]

My father picked up a used Compaq Armada 7380DMT and just dropped it on me "to see if I could make it useful".

I'm just about to start, but when I saw it boot up with 16Mb & win98 I lost a bit of me enthusiasm....and it's white. :?

 

[digitalwanderer]

Y'know what? I forgot just how much I loved 98se. 8)

I also forgot that 16Mb ain't the end of the world if you're using 98se, and remembering all the tricks/tweaks to streamline the OS is like a pleasant and refreshing walk down memory lane for me.

Cacheman 4.1, gads I still love it!

 

[Moloch]

You loved win98?
Are you insane?

 

[Blazkowicz]

I love win98 SE too!
still usable today as a main OS (which I did till recently, now win 2k3)

no, he's insane because he deals with a miserable 16MB of RAM (I'd put windows 3.11 on that)
in my experience triple the RAM is not enough for surfing with a somewhat modern browser (read : IE 5 and better). well, it's enough, but irritating for me.


digi, what do you do to streamline it?
I would remove Internet Explorer and windows logo at boot, did a few things with TweakUI.
I put IE back in though, as it gives quicklaunch and favorites, and I wasn't seeing the difference on my 2400+ with 384MB (and then 512MB)
(and it was needed for installing .NET framework.. at first I would install IE, install framework, then remove IE again )

do you use progman.exe or taskman.exe as the shell?
(and good old winfile)

 

[digitalwanderer]

Hey, win98se was a great OS...ignore the hecklers. It was an enthusiasts dream, never meant for serious users.

I usually hit it with Cacheman, tweakui, defrag, force a permanent swapfile, and some other stuff I just don't remember right now.

I used 98se too for a long time, but it's been so long since I used it I can't recall the last time.

 

[Moloch]

win98 is horrible because you can't leave the box on for months at a time and liked to blue screen, on the first boot even.. as in I installed it and on the first boot I get a blue screen.

 

[Blazkowicz]

I had a IBM P133 router running 24/7 on win98 SE , almost never crashed, even though I sometimes played DOS games on it (and networked doom/quake 1)


you'd better have a stable PC and stay away from the non SE version. (SE is the bugfixed version)

yes you still get some blue screens (it's funny, some times you can get a blue screen and go on as if nothing happened).
It's FAR better than windows 95 (whose french version had some more bugs too!)

the worse aspects of 98SE for me : the GDI ressources limitations (Steam and a few other badly designed apps eat a lot of GDI resources; mozilla firebird even had a severe GDI leak, fixed with changing a config variable ) ; and most often you're fscked when explorer.exe locks up (explorer.exe is still rather unstable in win NT 5.x but there you can easily kill it)

the best : very fast, a few seconds for booting on a recent PC, DOS still there and good DOS compatibility inside windows, and it's more simple/less bloated than following windows versions.

 

[digitalwanderer]

Hmmm, now that I got it a bit cleaned up I kind of like it....I'm thinking if I upgrade the 16Mb to 128Mb it actually might be kind of useable.

It's looking like around $70us so far for for a pair of 64Mb 60ns EDO SODIMMs for it, (that ain't the shop I'm pricing at, just the one with the best description page), am I missing a trick at finding it cheaper?

 

[digitalwanderer]

$40us shipped is more like it. 8)

Playing with a spare monitor and the docking bay and that's sort of neat, I see potential.

Need to get wireless access next....

 

[digitalwanderer]

Hmmm, and some paint. Any color is better than this bleh white/beige, any suggestions? (No, not pink this time)

 

[mangrove]

16Mb

I once ran Windows NT4 Server on the minimum specification to see if it could be done. That was a 16MHz 386SX (SX for 386 meant "16 bit memory bus") with 12 MB RAM. Of course, it was the old 30-something-pin memories that existed in the ancient times.

16 MB should be enough for anyone

 

[_xxx_]

Digi, what's that thingy good for today? I'd either throw it away or give it to my kids for disassembling excercises...

 

[anaqer]

Digi, I'm not sure you'd want 128MB in that thing since most of the popular P1 class shipsets ( FX, VX, MX, TX ) could only cache <64MB of memory... blecch, how I hated Intel back then for not removing this retarded limitation for the (otherwise nice) 430TX...

 

[digitalwanderer]

Digi, what's that thingy good for today? I'd either throw it away or give it to my kids for disassembling excercises...

It's not mine, it's my dads and he's computer illiterate/phobic so it's a shiny new system to him.

This is the man who back in the 70s told me and my brother that computers were a fad and would never beat paper and pencil for figuring out problems when we were bugging him to get us a Pineapple/VIC-20. (We got the VIC-20)

 

[digitalwanderer]

Digi, I'm not sure you'd want 128MB in that thing since most of the popular P1 class shipsets ( FX, VX, MX, TX ) could only cache <64MB of memory... blecch, how I hated Intel back then for not removing this retarded limitation for the (otherwise nice) 430TX...

So a 98se machine just can't use over 64Mb? How dorky! :?

The reason I got the 2x64Mb is because it's the most this laptop can take and it was only about $10 diff 'tween 2x32Mb & 2x64Mb.

Besides, I know I can make 98se perform pretty well with 128Mb & 266Mhz....so I figured it would help, I kind of forgot about the limit.

 

[anaqer]

Oh, it will work and the system will see the whole 128 megs - it might end up being slower though. By how much (and if, even) ... well, I guess that depends on what applications it'd be running. I only know that performance on an ALi 1541 + K6/2 400MHz dropped by almost 20% when going from 128MB to 192MB, but since yours is a different chipset and processor with less memory... I dunno.

 

[digitalwanderer]

Dude, I'm currently always out of physical memory and using at least 15Mb of virtual on a slow-assed hard-drive......128Mb will make this sucker FLY!

Seriously, I was almost crying last night seeing at how bottlenecked this laptop was with it's low memory....it can do a lot better than it is and $40us is worth it.

Meh, it ain't my money....I'm using someone elses IT budget on this or else charging him for it. I love my old man and all, but I ain't gonna piss off my wife.

The labour is free, but parts I charge cost for.

 

[{Sniping}Waste]

Ill see what I can find for you DW. In the computer fairs around Dallas, I have found 64meg EDO sodimms for $1 to $5 used. If I find one for you, Ill ship it.

I beleave the lappy has 16meg on the mobo and 1 slot for mem upgrade so a max of 80 meg for the lappy. 80meg will be much faster then the 16 it has.

 

[anaqer]

Dude, I'm currently always out of physical memory and using at least 15Mb of virtual on a slow-assed hard-drive......128Mb will make this sucker FLY!

Well, you might want to consider upgrading the HDD as well then.

 

[digitalwanderer]

Ill see what I can find for you DW. In the computer fairs around Dallas, I have found 64meg EDO sodimms for $1 to $5 used. If I find one for you, Ill ship it.

Dang it, I should have asked you first.

Thanks for the thought, but I already ordered the memory and it's shipped. If you see any decent HDs that will fit it that are around 20Gb let me know, I can't seem to find them cheap yet.