Reminder: win98 was really, really bad

I threw win98 on that old laptop to see if the win wifi card would work, since I inherited the original win98 install/recovery CDs. Didn't work even under windows.

Things I forgot I hated:

• installing windows
• freaking long software keys you have to key in
  
• rebooting every time you change anything nontrivial.
  
• installing windows drivers
• that "invisible drummer" please wait animation
• "Windows has found new hardware..."

A modern linux vs. old windows isn't a fair fight, but get this: it took 2.5 hours to get win98 installed and browsing the net. The linux distro I put back on it after that was up in 13 minutes -- I timed it. Both installs including fdisk'ing the the hd clean and reformatting. The Win98 time would have been longer but I located/downloaded/burned the drivers on a seperate machine's CD burner while it was installing, so I wouldn't have to wait. I didn't even apply any service packs, which would have added more time.

DSL on a 233mHz laptop

I was given an old laptop yesterday to see if I could make it run. 233mHz, 64MB RAM, 4GB drive. Press releases suggest this was a $1,500 laptop in the late 90s.

It took a bit of guesswork and maneuvering but within a half-hour I had the little beast up and surfing the web on Damn Small Linux, a 50MB distro. DSL uses the 2.4 kernel so it's friendlier to older hardware.

The battery appears to be shot but but runs fine from mains.