On Mon, Jan 2, 2017 at 12:41 PM, Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sun, Jan 1, 2017 at 8:52 PM, dmccunney <dennis.mccun...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On Sun, Jan 1, 2017 at 8:56 PM, Thomas Mueller <mueller6...@twc.com> wrote: >> >> My old notebook was set to multiboot, with Win2K Pro, a couple of >> flavors of Linux, and FreeDOS on separate HD partitions. > > Do you ever watch YouTube? I found a guy recently (Druaga1) who made > various videos about (re)installing various Windows on old machines, > especially regarding him also putting in SSD drives (etc.) to see if > it increases speed.
I do watch YouTube, but not for stuff like this. I can *read* a lot faster than I can *watch*, and I don't need the visual aids if I have decent written instructions. > In particular, here's "Installing Windows 2000 on an SD Card": > > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-hDOiI0-6s I have Win10 and Ubuntu installed on an SSD on my desktop, and it speeds things up a treat. I could install Win2K to SSD, but there's no point. The ancient notebook came to me with WinXP SP2 installed. It had a whopping 265MB RAM, and the Crusoe CPU grabbed 16MB off the top for code morphing. XP wants 512MB RAM to *think* about performing. The machine as I got it took 8 minutes to simply boot, and a lot more to do anything. I reformatted and re-partitioned the drive, installing Win2K on an NTFS slice, Ubuntu and Puppy Linux on ext4 slices, and FreeDOS on a FAT32 slice. Win2K actually runs more or less acceptably in that little RAM, especially when everything that can be removed from Startup is. Ubuntu and Puppy behaved reasonably. FreeDOS flew. A roadblock was a limitation to IDE4 for the HD. This was a BIOS restriction. I doubted installing an SSD would provide the sort of performance boost it might otherwise, and in any case, the machine was purely a test bed to see what performance I could wring out of it *without* throwing money at it. That meant no new hardware. I had fun tweaking, configuring, and learning, but had no actual regular job for the machine to do. When I'd taken it as far as I could, I put it on a shelf. >> IIRC, I formatted the FreeDOS partition FAT32. But getting FreeDOS to *boot* >> from a grub2 menu was a challenge, and I had to do a lot of fiddling >> before it worked. I never did figure out just which fiddle did the >> trick. Then an unrelated problem forced me to wipe and reinstall 2K >> and redo multi-boot under grub2. I got Windows and Linux booting >> again, but never could get FreeDOS back. >> >> I haven't even booted the machine in a year or more. > > Would ms-sys ( http://ms-sys.sourceforge.net/ ) help? Dunno! I don't know either, but frankly don't care. See above about test bed. > It's times like that which suggest reformatting / reinstalling. If > you're not using it anyways (assuming you double-check and backup any > semi-important files), you may as well fix it. It simply isn't worth the time and effort involved. Actually work all got done elsewhere. Nothing on the machine would be lost if it went away. But I don't have anything to do with the machine if I *did* fix it. Without a plausible use case, why bother? I have too many other things to do with the time it would take. > The "good" (ha!) thing about Linux is that it becomes obsolete fairly > quickly, so reinstalling is usually an improvement. Depends. I had to reinstall Ubuntu, when a version upgrade failed. The last step in the upgrade was installing a new kernel. The new kernel needed PAE support. The old box didn't have it. KErnel installation failed, and that caused a cascade failure on reboot. I wound up wiping, reformatting, and reinstalling Ubuntu from scratch on its slice, then stopping carefully just *before* the update that caused the problems. I don't use the machine anymore, so it no longer matters. > I had a USB jump drive with antiX Mepis Linux (13.2? circa 2013), > which was fairly interesting, useful, and quite speedy. Honestly, I > was morbidly curious how well it would work since they claimed it > worked on PIII-class machines (aka, obsolete), although I don't have > that need. But the included Firefox was old (various websites, e.g. > Google stuff, complained), and it had some other things that were old > (I forget, honestly). Long story short, I just reinstalled to a newer > version (16.1?) about a week ago, which brings Firefox ESR, newer > kernel, and some other goodies. Browsing was problematic on the old notebook. Win2K was limited to IE 6 if you ran IE. Firefox was simply too big and resource hungry under Win2K or Linux. It would take something like 45 seconds to load, and was perceptibly sluggish when up. Chrome and Opera invoked faster, but I don't really care for either. In general, I simply didn't browse from that machine. > (And it [still] has DOSBox pre-installed, woot!) I have a port of DOSBox on my Android tablet, with several old DOS apps up and running under it. >>> My computer hardware no longer has any floppy capability. >> >> Nor most of mine, but that's why a USB floppy drive is a useful accessory. > > In this day and age, we need to backup everything, or heavily rely on > the ever-present network for exchanging files. Relying on static media > is still a valid option, but there is no single ultra-reliable source, > so it's best not to keep too many eggs in one basket. Dare I be naive > and state the obvious? "Free" software is easier to acquire / backup / > (re)install than constantly worrying about proprietary muck. It's not > all doom and gloom, but the simpler the better. By preference, if there *is* a decent open source application for what I need to do, it's what I use. But the stuff I'm concerned about isn't *programs*, it's *data*. I have copies of the distribution files for everything I run, so can replace it without going online for the most part. Data gets backed up various ways. Some of it in in the cloud. Some of it is on local media. And I don't store an enormous amount of data in any case. ______ Dennis ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, SlashDot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
