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Help with Gateway Solo 2550 (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 21 hours ago by bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works to c/retrocomputing@lemmy.sdf.org

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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.

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[–] hexagonwin@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

Does it have a lan port? If it does, you may be able to transfer the required files into it and setup multiboot with win2k and win98. split the current win2k partition to two, install dos6.22 on the new partition and copy win98 install cd contents to a dir in it, then install win98 from dos.

[–] bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 1 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

It only has a modem port. Could get a lan port with a pcmcia card.

Would that method work to then clear out win 2k? I dont really need it.

I wonder if the usb ports are dead. Even if I plug in a mouse with an led, it doesn't light up or anything. All I have left is parallel or serial for getting data into it. Or the floppy drive.

[–] hexagonwin@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Well I guess you can then wipe the 2k partition and install dos/win9x and boot into that and remove the second partition, not too sure how partition management works on win9x/dos though.

A better solution might be to pull out the hard drive and installing dos there. This way you can also check if the drives got any bad sectors and also dump the current data so you can restore win2k later. (especially if this is a factory install, the drivers you have installed now may be impossible to find later on)

Is the hard drive easily accessible? Laptop pata to usb doesn't cost much.

Even if you install a pcmcia lan card, you might need to install the driver for that (lol). btw i'm sure you did already but do check if the usb is enabled in bios.

[–] bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 1 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] hexagonwin@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 17 hours ago

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.