Bought a Win98 computer lol

Videodrome

Videodrome

Truckinator
Sep 12, 2013
12,949
10,013
3,730
BBQ Belt
banhammer.us
Saw it at a garage sale. Thought What the Hell and offered $10. It did come with the monitor, keyboard, mouse, and speakers. It even has the Manual and Win98 recover disks lol.

It runs surprisingly well even though I think somebody raided the RAM chips. I have some old RAM chips so if I'm lucky they might fit.
Might be interesting to see what I can do puttering around with an old machine. Might be a good way to learn more about hardware. I might try some Retro-Gaming :cool:.

I'm also a Linux/UNIX geek, so right now I'm putting FreeBSD on it. I'm curious to see how that performs with limited memory. I think even the HDD is only 8 GB.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Plainview
This old PC is mostly something to tinker with to refresh my knowledge on Hardware if I try upgrading it. I did acquire a 512MB RAM stick, but I think it exceeds the supported memory of this motherboard lol.

In the meantime, I did succesfully install FreeBSD with the very lean IceWM window manager. So it can actually load a desktop on just 64MB.
 
It works!

I'm posting from this computer here. :eek:


A local PC shop let me have 2 sticks of what he considered junk RAM for free. I think I have close to 312 MB of RAM now.

Windows 98 has been replaced with FreeBSD (UNIX) and the very lite IceWM desktop that I think uses only 4MB of RAM. I'm posting on the lite Midori web browser. Browsing is just a tad laggy and I'm not even trying YouTbe.

I have installed some lite Word Processors or other lite Office Programs and they seem to work great though. This could still be a totally fine Office PC now.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Plainview
I've never been a Windows fan, but it sure were nice back in the day, when you actually got the OS on disk, and allways could easily fix your own pc by writing 'format c: /s' then 'd:' and 'install', and have everything up and running again 1-2 hours later.
Trying to accomplish the same thing with modern windows, takes me a weekend. :-/

Probably the best option to run FreeBSD on it, I hear that is extremely lite on the hardware requirements - just out of curiosity have you tried using stuff like MorphOS before?
 
KongRudi said:
I've never been a Windows fan, but it sure were nice back in the day, when you actually got the OS on disk, and allways could easily fix your own pc by writing 'format c: /s' then 'd:' and 'install', and have everything up and running again 1-2 hours later.
Trying to accomplish the same thing with modern windows, takes me a weekend. :-/

Probably the best option to run FreeBSD on it, I hear that is extremely lite on the hardware requirements - just out of curiosity have you tried using stuff like MorphOS before?
Click to expand...

I haven't used MorphOS.

I did try a funky OS called Kolibri. It had limited applications, but it was a super fast operating system.

http://kolibrios.org/en/
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back