Open Source Plus Microsoft: A Christmas System Overhaul
by Sam Dean - Dec. 26, 2008Comments (1)- Related Blog Posts
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On Christmas Eve, I saw my 18-year old cousin, who has just started college. Knowing that he was going to see me, he had brought along an old Dell Latitude notebook computer, circa late 1999 or so, and running Windows 98--a dinosaur. The notebook had once been used by his father for work, but was unneeded by him and unwanted anymore by his company. My cousin couldn't get it to boot past the Windows logo. My cousin's idea was that it could be fixed up and upgraded so that it might be like a netbook that he could use at school, with a few extras such as a nice large screen and full-size keyboard. This overhaul, it turned out--including getting the notebook to speak Wi-Fi--was my job.
I took the notebook home on Christmas Eve, worked on it for a couple hours yesterday evening , then called my cousin to tell him he can pick it up when he can, and that it's not a bad little netbook. It's heavy at about five pounds, but he's a fit college kid and the keyboard and 12-inch display are definitely better than what you get on a netbook. The system also has a decent 80GB hard drive, Pentium processor, almost a gigabyte of RAM, and a CD-ROM drive. He can play games on it. It also has no problem with 1024 x 768 resolution, which many netbooks don't do at all. Here's what I did with this stalled dinosaur, including imbuing it with open source and Wi-Fi smarts.
My initial idea, since Windows 98 was hanging at bootup, was to install Ubuntu, but my cousin wasn't having this. He views Linux as "complicated," only for hackers, and is adamant that Windows is what he understands. I think this view is more widespread than many Linux lovers realize.
In all versions of Microsoft Windows, even if they are hanging at bootup, you can usually boot the operating system in Safe Mode, where it loads an extremely limited set of device drivers. It's just a diagnostic mode. I deliberately aborted a boot to get the system to ask me if I wanted Safe Mode (on many Windows systems you can simply hit the F8 key). After I launched the OS in Safe Mode, I found a difficult problem to wrestle with. In Safe Mode, Windows didn't recognize that there was a CD-ROM drive (no drivers loaded). It had an icon for AOL and I probably could have gotten it online via a dial-up connection of some type, but as it stood, it didn't speak CD-ROM and it couldn't go online--a dumb terminal.
In Windows' Safe Mode, you can go to the Start menu, select Run, and then type msconfig to bring up Microsoft's System Configuration Utility. On the General tab of this utility, you can choose "Selective Startup" modes to isolate where a problem lies. I used this to try starting the computer with only Autoexec.bat, only Win.ini, only System.ini, and combinations of these startup processes. It turned out that the booting problem arrived when loading System.ini. So I went into the System.ini tab, and shut off everything except drivers needed to recognize hardware components and 32-bit system drivers (this computer came just after everything was 16-bit).
Voila! Windows 98 loaded like a charm, I could now see the CD-ROM drive in the My Computer module, high-res graphics were working, the system had very nice audio, and everything was in place for success except taking it online. One thing I also noted is that Windows 98 is a super lean OS compared to today's Windows versions--especially Vista. The machine was booting in 20 seconds, and shut down in less than 10 seconds. There could be a keep-it-simple lesson for Microsoft here--as its operating systems have gotten more bloated--and an opportunity for Linux. The quickness is one of the reasons I decided not to upgrade this system to a later version of Windows.
The next problem I had was how to get the machine to speak to the Wi-Fi in my cousin's dorm. Wi-Fi was hardly used in this computer's era. It had two slots for PCMCIA (PC Card) cards, though, and I've collected a few of these over the years. I dug through some stuff for an old Netgear card that works with Windows 98 and 802.11g (most PC Cards don't work with Win98 anymore, although you can buy unused old ones that enable Wi-Fi on Amazon). I loaded the driver for it from its CD-ROM, went looking for the signal in my house, and boom, there it was--a Wi-Fi connected Windows dinosaur with many features that improve on what you get in a netbook.
My final step was to load lean, current open source applications on the system, because the ones on it--even the Microsoft Office applications--were woefully out of date and unnecessarily bloated for the hardware resources available. I went to PortableApps.com, which we covered here. It lets you get a truckload of top open source applications for Windows in one download, and maintains a tiny footprint by favoring portable versions of applications. (Mac Libre has an equivalent solution for Mac users.) Now, the system has multiple browsers, AbiWord, OpenOffice, ClamWin Anti-Virus, VLC Media Player (an older version works with Windows 98) and lots of good open source titles.
The total cost of this upgrade to my cousin: zero dollars. Total cost to me: about $20, if the Netgear card is even worth that now. Hey, it's Christmas, and, as GigaOm is reporting, netbooks were a giant hit for Amazon this holiday season.
