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Uploaded: August 16th, 2024.

Updated: October 9th, 2024.

As mentioned in my general journal entry, i have recently bought a decent old setup. Managed to get a whole computer tower, monitor, keyboard, wires, and even a Microsoft Mouse for 80 quid! My face lit up like a kid in a sweet shop when I saw all the old stuff stacked up high on warehouse shelves, but it didn't take long for my attention to snap onto the setup I had been waiting days for waiting for me on an isolated storage box. We talked about the specs and other computer-related stuff and eventually went back to the boot and all the way home with a complete retro setup.

Cant complain about a system with a Pentium III and 256MB of RAM, it's well suited for Windows XP and excelling with my plans to transition the system to Windows 98 Second Edition. After I set it all up I went to bed and finally turned it on properly the next morning.

After messing around with the control pannel and inspecting the system information, I stuffed some mp3s onto a CD and messed around with the media player. I couldn't manage to play video .avi files unfortuantley, and the vlc i installed didnt work so i will find a solution to that another time. I did play plenty of 3D Pinball though, it was suprisingly fun, i think i got 2,300,000 Points or something like that.

my desktop after some customaization^

Playing around with Windows XP did bring back some memories too. I remember my first personal computer being very lackluster, freezing up if you had more than one or two windows open. Hell, im suprised it managed to run minecraft while i built huge hotels and towns over LAN with my dad. Also remember playing the sims 3 at dogshit quality and not really thinking much about how it could be better. 

two weeks ago i finnaly managed to pick up a decent 10GB hard disk of eBay, with it arriving in working order too which was extremley helpful.

Now, when i started out with this project, i had ideas that were shattered immediatley, spending hours chipping away at an issue only for another to arise and derail the narrow circumstances for installation and stuff like that. for example, it took me a while to figure out that i needed a boot disk for the retail version of windows 98 to run, which wasnt booting because the drive was still formatted under NTFS which doesnt allow for DOS booting stuff.

Without the boot disk working i couldnt format the disk, so i had to get a very helpful cd-rom burn of FreeDOS which allowed me to format the hard disk from the cd-rom drive, which should make the boot disks work right? right?? of course not.

So the boot disks wernt working even though the hard disk was formatted under FAT32, so THEN i had to figure out how to make a boot disk for the retail cd to start, but that went nowhere and i wasted a couple hours accidentaly installing FreeDOS and then playing with the bundled games.

Finally, i gave up and just went with the OEM version of Windows 98 Second Edition, removing the tedius thorn of 'boot diskettes' and booting RIGHT from the CD-ROM itself, which went of without a hitch, barreling right through the setup program.

After the setup was done, the system restarted and the computer automaticaly boots into windows 98 without any floppy disks.. even old technology sucked when it was new.

Everything from that point on was all figured out. i found my motherboard and many of it's components online through a quick google search, found Windows 9x drivers for the chipset, video, and audio, and then i just let the progress bars inch forward and reset the computer one final time.

It was reliving and satisfying to hear that retro-futuristic stretching whir of synthy millenium goodness soaring out of my speakers, a firm and final steak of progress and finalzation marking the begining of a fresh new windows 98 system.

Now, i recently uploaded a video of the first complete boot on youtube, so go soothe yourself with those hard disk pings and the canned and dilouted whirs of the windows 98 startup sound if you want.

Computer Startup after all drivers were installed