Nov 132010
 

What looks wrong with this photo?

Wall-mounted, widescreen 23″ TFT monitor displaying Windows 98? 😛 Talk about ancient and modern! I’m having an office clearout and decided that I no longer require a 12 year old disused mini-tower Windows 98 PC, when I’ve got a Win 7 laptop, a dualboot Ubuntu/XP laptop (2003 vintage – I use for teaching), and another pentium 4 Ubuntu desktop machine (that one’s just for fun).

A couple of months ago we part-exchanged out oldest laptop (1997 – with Windows 95 on it) and got £50 off the price of Tomek’s Acer One netbook.

But the point of this little story is a doubly ironic twist. Irony 1 – windows 98 in widescreen flat panel TFT. Irony 2 was that in order to get my data off this machine before dumping it, I had to update it to SP2 and then install some drivers so it could communicate with a flash drive. Get that? Update a machine so you can throw it away :silly: . The only other options were to…

  1. go in the loft and dig out the external CDR drive and burn a couple of CDs.
  2. try to get a win 7 machine to talk to win 98 via a CAT5 ethernet cable (rather you than me)

So I found a useful site which told me that you can use USB flash drives with Windows 98. 😀 I gave it a go and it worked. Now the windows 98 machine is in line for recycling. I took the PSU out. They’re useful little things. And also the hard disk (2GB :rotfl:). But the rest is out of here. It served us well in its time, but now it’s just taking up valuable space – well not any more. But I just had to get a shot of the ancient and modern combination for old times sake. Look at this photo. It’s not the photo that’s grainy, it’s the Windows 98 graphic.

Windows 98 on a widescreen TFT. :)

Windows 98 on a widescreen TFT. 🙂

The nice thing about declaring a machine obsolete, is that all the manuals and floppy disks that went with it can be disposed of as well. This frees up quite a bit of space. 😎