Hey everyone! I wanted an affordable way to get back into retrocomputing, and wanted to play some DOS and potentially windows98 games on real hardware again.
I got this laptop for about 30 bucks-it's in good shape, 64mb ram, 5 gb hdd and a P3. Has cd and 3.5" floppy, and Win 2000 Pro installed.
However, a couple issues. the worst of which, the usb ports do not seem to be working, and the CD drive does not work either (spins up, but will not read any disc).
The USB ports and CD drive are seen in device manager. I've reinstalled the drivers multiple times without success.
I'm not sure where to go from here. I planned to either install FreeDOS or windows 98 on this. For now, I did order a PCMCIA card with usb 2.0 ports on it and I hope that will at least work. But I'm still going to be stuck with a potentially non-working CD drive and I'm unsure how I'll install Win98 without that. I suppose worst case, I can install FreeDOS on the floppy drive, which I'm pretty sure works.
And yes, I realize it's probably a junk machine, but all my old machines were thrown away (without my knowledge) years ago and I missed old computing.
Sure, I may do that , the drive is a bit noisy but doesn't sound like its failing. Its easy to get to. At least.
This pc originally came with win 98. Luckily all the drivers are avilable on the archive.
I worried about that with the pcm card needing drivers but decided to gamble for 20 dollars.
I cannot see any bios option for usb. Its just odd they seem to not have any power output either.
Nice, then the driver wouldn't be an issue.
btw I just remembered using the format tool in WinXP (My Computer -> right click drive -> format) to create a bootable MS-DOS (think it was the winme one - so ms-dos 8?) floppy/usb. Not sure if it's on 2K too, would be worth checking. If it also works on an internal drive maybe you could partition the drive and install DOS on the second drive without any external media.