Free Computer

[SciPunk]

Not sure which forum to put this, so I picked this one... hope it's OK.

My brother's friend was about to throw out his old PC, so my bro took it instead. It's an old Gateway Pentium (not P2, or P4... just Pentium). Has about 64Mb of memory and a 1GB hard drive. It works well enough w/ Win95 installed, except gives a few errors on startup (the old .vxd file not found), and Windows was set up for the Thai language.

He wants his 11 year old to use it for typing reports for school, and doesn't want to spend a dime. I told him I would donate an bigger hard drive and could probably find some cheep SD ram essentially free. I have an unused original Win95 CD w/ the serial number.

So if I were to swap in a new hard drive and do a clean install of Win95, I assume there will be a host of drivers needed. Is there a way to tell exactly which drivers those would be? Any thoughts on where I could find them?

PS: please don't tell me to buy a new computer. That's obvious, but it's not part of the design parameters for this project.

 

[Doughbuy]

Ewwwww... I don't even know if companies support Win 95 anymore, much less products that you will run on it... can always give the part manufacturers a shot, but you'll need luck on that.

Win 95... I don't even remember what the interface was like... such a long time ago...

 

[Guest]

You need to go into the equivalent of device manager, look what are the peripheral and so on, and try to find the driver BEFORE cleaning it.

Otherwise, I think you can type msconfig in a dos prompt and have access to the boot.ini and so on. YOu can manually search for strings containing the missing VXD and delete them so you dont get the errors.

I would ghost the Windows on the new HD and manually clean it.
Or ghost it on the new hd, do a fresh install see if you get the drivers and if you manage a clean install ghost it back.

I suggest always keeping a copy because it is pretty valuable since no other OS will likely run smooth on it!

 

[audiovoodoo]

For what you want to do I'd say you would be better off with a copy of Damn Small Linux http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/. It will almost certainly just work with hardware of that vintage and whats more it is supported and patched unlike Win95.

Good luck on re-using an old computer. I think its something that we should all be doing more. Not every user needs a C2D!!

 

[joefriday]

Don't waste your time with more ram. 64MB is the perfect amount for Windows 95. The most important thing to do before you attempt a clean install, is to make sure you can find all the win95 drivers for his hardware. That will be the toughest part. Find them all and you should be good to go.

www.oldversion.com is your source for old versions of common programs you will likely want/need on your windows 95 machine. I can easily attest for Real JukeBox 2.0. That program kicks ass for windows 95. Honestly, for a glorified type writer, windows 95 should work great.

I vote against DSL. It runs much slower than Windows 95, and if this isn't going to be on the internet, the security risk of windows 95 is null.

 

[grant_77]

This is a very old computer but will suffice for the task. Msconfig and cleanup are good ideas.

I would suggest looking on ebay for parts. There are lots of used old parts out there like ram and hard drives or $10-20 and will make the system a little more user friendly.

However, for word processing and windows 95, 64 mb or ram, and 1 gb hard drive should be enough, because your not going to be loading anything else on it, it may just be worth while to leave it as is. That way it is truly free. And then when the kids 14 in 2010, u can buy him one of those Intel 80 processor computer

 

[MarcusL]

Gateway is real bad about using proprietary motherboards. You will have serious trouble finding drivers if you don't have the original CD (or floppies o_0 )...

I would recommend getting a copy of win98SE off ebay or something. Maybe the early plug and play in there can find generic drivers for your hardware. Otherwise, just use the OS as is and learn Thai...

If you must reinstall, back up the old windows directory on a CD first. Then during the new install when windows chokes on an unknown driver, you can point to the old windows install and let it try to salvage the needed files from there. might be your only hope.

Whatever you do, don't hook it up to the internet. It is unsecurable and will be a spambot within 5 minutes.

 

[500r420]

If you're upgrading the memory you have to watch out that you are getting the right sort
those type of computers usually have the kind of memory that installs diagonally instead of the 168 pin

 

[crusher]

and watch out with the HD because that mobos only support like 2 or 3 gigs of space. Buying a large HD will be a waste of money, at least on that computer.

 

[chuckshissle]

Thai? No thanks I can barely speak Spanish.