Tea
Storage? I am Storage!
I'm thinking Microsoft are getting tired of the activation millstone for old versions of Windows. (It must be a significant expense for them after all, and one that doesn't generate any income at all. And they have to provide that service, by law, pretty much forever.)
Over the last few days I've organised the old boy a dedicated accounting machine because modern Windows versions make a horrible mess of running DOS programs - contrast with the superb way OS/2 handled that task - and because it is much faster and easier to have two machines than it is to muck about flipping from one view to another all the time (e.g., your bank statement to the accounts window and back). Even with dual screens, it's still better to have two computers. Oh, and I have to muck about with DOSBox or similar, which is perfectly doable but yet another layer of complication Tannin doesn't understand.
INFO FOR MERC and SEDRO
(Because Merc loves Thinkpads and Sedro loves ridiculously old computers. Well, OK, let's be honest, Merc doesn't really love Thinkpads, he just says that to get them into bed.)
Anyway, we had a beautiful old IBM Thinkpad lying around. The only thing wrong with it is a flat CMOS battery. He's just setting the date by hand at present but I'll get around to replacing the battery soonish.
It's a beautiful little thing: a Thinkpad 600x, which was effectively the very first T Series unit before they started calling them T Series. Lithium battery (even back then!), lovely screen, superb keyboard. The main drawback is that it only has a single USB port (USB 1) and the PS/2 port (for reasons I can't fathom) doesn't like keyboards, only mice - and then not very reliably. But with an external USB hub I found lying around, that's no issue. No network on-board, just a modem, but we don't need to or even particularly want to network this little gem. Every now and then Tannin makes a backup onto USB stick.
The factory hard drive was a massive 11GB and it was running quite happily on, of all things, Windows ME! I could have just left it as-is (we only need about 80MB (MB not GB) for data at very most) and the ME was working fine; it even coped OK with swapping USB devices, but Tannin said he would lose his reputation for cool if he had to use ME so I stuck in a spare 120GB drive and installed XP on the little darling. It has a Pentium III 500 and 196MB of RAM. I had intended to upgrade the RAM as well, but it is working perfectly well, so why bother?
Best of all, it has a proper 4x3 screen! This provides vastly better picture quality when you are using DOS full-screen. 1024 x 760 of clear, sharp text, undistorted by aspect ratio weirdness. Yay!
INFO FOR EVERYONE ELSE
With no network, I had to activate it by phone. The really interesting thing - and I have never, ever heard of this before - is that when the nice recorded activation lady gave me the 42-digit activation number she explicitly said that "you can use this same number for future activations". That is a huge change in their policy! A few years ago, you could be shot or sent to Guantanamo Bay or something just for thinking about that, now they offer it as routine!
Over the last few days I've organised the old boy a dedicated accounting machine because modern Windows versions make a horrible mess of running DOS programs - contrast with the superb way OS/2 handled that task - and because it is much faster and easier to have two machines than it is to muck about flipping from one view to another all the time (e.g., your bank statement to the accounts window and back). Even with dual screens, it's still better to have two computers. Oh, and I have to muck about with DOSBox or similar, which is perfectly doable but yet another layer of complication Tannin doesn't understand.
INFO FOR MERC and SEDRO
(Because Merc loves Thinkpads and Sedro loves ridiculously old computers. Well, OK, let's be honest, Merc doesn't really love Thinkpads, he just says that to get them into bed.)
Anyway, we had a beautiful old IBM Thinkpad lying around. The only thing wrong with it is a flat CMOS battery. He's just setting the date by hand at present but I'll get around to replacing the battery soonish.
It's a beautiful little thing: a Thinkpad 600x, which was effectively the very first T Series unit before they started calling them T Series. Lithium battery (even back then!), lovely screen, superb keyboard. The main drawback is that it only has a single USB port (USB 1) and the PS/2 port (for reasons I can't fathom) doesn't like keyboards, only mice - and then not very reliably. But with an external USB hub I found lying around, that's no issue. No network on-board, just a modem, but we don't need to or even particularly want to network this little gem. Every now and then Tannin makes a backup onto USB stick.
The factory hard drive was a massive 11GB and it was running quite happily on, of all things, Windows ME! I could have just left it as-is (we only need about 80MB (MB not GB) for data at very most) and the ME was working fine; it even coped OK with swapping USB devices, but Tannin said he would lose his reputation for cool if he had to use ME so I stuck in a spare 120GB drive and installed XP on the little darling. It has a Pentium III 500 and 196MB of RAM. I had intended to upgrade the RAM as well, but it is working perfectly well, so why bother?
Best of all, it has a proper 4x3 screen! This provides vastly better picture quality when you are using DOS full-screen. 1024 x 760 of clear, sharp text, undistorted by aspect ratio weirdness. Yay!
INFO FOR EVERYONE ELSE
With no network, I had to activate it by phone. The really interesting thing - and I have never, ever heard of this before - is that when the nice recorded activation lady gave me the 42-digit activation number she explicitly said that "you can use this same number for future activations". That is a huge change in their policy! A few years ago, you could be shot or sent to Guantanamo Bay or something just for thinking about that, now they offer it as routine!
