Thread: Talk about retro...

So my step mom asked me if I could salvage what ever documents we have on our Windows 98 computer and put it on their computer. I initially thought, oh, this will be easy, put the thing together and connect my external, boom, done. Alas, I was mistaken.

Getting this project to work was quite the experience. To even start, I had to cannibalize a bunch of stuff. I took the P/S 1 connection mouse and keyboard that came with our HP desktop 4 years ago as the input devices. Since we had recycled the original monitor, I had to take off my 22" LCD TV that I have as a 2nd monitor and use it as the monitor for this jerry-rig. I also used an old surge suppressor that my stepmom had for her old computer as there were too many plugs for a standard wall outlet, (considering I also had my external HD which needed room for its AC power).

Booted first time I hit the button surprisingly. Even after 4+ years of no use, what so ever. Unfortunately, it froze and I had to ctrl+alt+del twice to reboot. This is back when if you did it twice, it would automatically restart. Second time, worked like a charm. I tried plugging in my external only to find that the computer needed drivers that it wasn't recognizing from the external itself. Uh oh.

Then I realized that my folks' computer had a floppy reader, and so did this old one. Jackpot! So I then began moving a bunch of files, documents, the random picture or two, etc. I actually had to convert 2 of the pictures from .bmp to .jpeg so that the file could fit on the damn floppy hahahahahah! The .bmp's were like 3k and 4k (plus change) kb. So of course, they wouldn't fit on the standard 1.44mb floppy. So I had to scrounge around and ended up successfully converting them to the smaller .jpeg so it would fit. SUCCESS!!!

After I was done with that project, I did a double check to see if there were any extra files that contained data that we might want to save, and found nothing. I then looked up the system specs in My Computer-->properties and was floored by what I saw. Intel pentium II processor, 10 GB hard drive (5+ Gigs were still open) and 98MB of RAM. Yes...98 MEGABYTES of RAM.

Jesus titty fucking christ....that was a standard system in 98/99, 10 years ago. My, hasn't technology changed.

It is pretty amazing, considering.

Especially when you realize all you had to do was pull the drive and put it in your computer..... Viola :P

Unless of course there was no IDE connection

Originally Posted by Warprosper

Especially when you realize all you had to do was pull the drive and put it in your computer..... Viola :P

Unless of course there was no IDE connection

I dun think Windows 7 can read such a barbaric computing language....

Originally Posted by DancingCorpse

Originally Posted by Warprosper

Especially when you realize all you had to do was pull the drive and put it in your computer..... Viola :P

Unless of course there was no IDE connection

I dun think Windows 7 can read such a barbaric computing language....

It can read IDE devices, no problem.

no, this was for a data transfer from a win 98 to xp. The thing is so old, (by technology standards) that I was going to have to literally pry the sides off as there was no thumb screw to take off one of the side panels. Yeah...couldn't even access the guts of it. I shudder to think if I did, what I might find.

I wouldn't be surprised if the components fell into tiny piles of dust if you did manage to get to the inside.