Or you can try a local hamfest - there are usually older laptops that show up there, too... some for as little as $10 - $20!
The biggest problem I have run into so far is loading Win98 onto an older laptop with only a floppy drive... A friend of mine picked up a laptop with an interchangeable drive bay, and then bought a CD Drive for the laptop. Problem is: Win95 (loaded on the machine) won't recognize the drive, even though it IS seen and recognized by the BIOS. We think that *IF* we can find a way to load Win98 via floppy, we can get it to recognize the drive, but for now, the CD is unusable. Problem is, Win98 is 200+ MB... That's over 200 floppies!!! *OR* we need the Win95 device driver for the CD drive. Sorry for going even further off topic... Mark - N9WYS -----Original Message----- ----(snip)---- > I am hoping to get an old dest top with Db-9, RS-232c working with > my old > Windows 3.1 software. > This will mean taking this desk top to the repeater site, to program > the repeater > controller. Get an old laptop instead. Even if you can't keep the battery alive, it's a lot more convenient to lug an older heavy laptop around, and then it comes with its own keyboard & monitor as a bonus. Old laptops that will run DOS/Win 3.11 can often be found for far under $100 at used computer shops. They're ancient and the shop doesn't want them. Often it will cost the shop more to pay to recycle/dispose of them properly, than to give them away to you, if you find the right junk dealers. > I have a USB to Db-9, RS-232c adapter w/ a cd software. If I could > get a > Windows AT program to work with XP. A cheap old laptop loaded with DOS/Win 3.11/Win 98/whatever you need... multiple boot it with multiple partitions if you like even, that you set aside JUST for programming old radios. A bonus would be to find a "twin" for it and image the hard drive, and have a spare.
