Thinkpad T22, Windows 98 and Adequacy

This laptop was in such good condition that I did not even disassemble and clean it. Everything is working, the fan is whispering, the hard drive is cheerfully clicking on the heads. Even the battery is a bit alive. A miracle, not a laptop, despite the age of 17. Unlike earlier, still DOS- compatible models, computers of the early 2000s are very similar to modern ones. This is a deceptive impression: if you don’t expect any feats from a Windows 95 or MS-DOS machine, in this case it seems that here is another pair of drivers, and it will work as it should, download Facebook, telegrams and dropbox, photoshop and Office 365.

Nothing like this. The conditional border between working iron and antiques now passes somewhere in 2005. ThinkPad T22, the heir to the ideals of the ThinkPad 600, released in 2001. There will be no fights in this post, but there will be a story about installing Windows 98 SE and about trying to connect to at least some network - at least worldwide, even local.

Specs

This is a laptop from the same party, which I described in a previous post . He certainly is not that "like new." He, as usual, has problems with soft touch coating on the case:



Unlike the more ancient ThinkPad 600, the coating here does not collapse and does not stick, but the appearance is far from ideal. However, tolerant. I got the model 2647-8EG (went on sale March 20, 2001) with the following parameters (as of today):

Processor: Intel Pentium III 900 MHz
RAM: 256 MB DDR PC100 (maximum is 512)
Hard Drive: 30 GB 5400RPM IDE
Video: S3 Savage IX8 + with 8 MB of internal memory
Screen: 14 inches TFT with a resolution of 1024x768 (there were 1400x1050)
Optical drive: DVD-ROM, can be replaced on the drive or a second hard drive
Ports: Ethernet 100Mb / s, modem, 1xUSB 1.1, IrDA, COM, LPT, VGA, PCMCIA x2, PS / 2, S-Video video output, audio: headphones, microphone, line-in.
Dimensions: 304x250x33 mm
Weight: 2.4 kilograms.

The price is unknown, but for orientation, there is an advertisement from PC Magazine 2001 :



Over the three years since the release of the ThinkPad 600 (here’s an advertisement about it), the prices for the topchik have fallen markedly: by a thousand dollars, or even by two. I’ll share life hacking: if you want to know a little more about the new-old-old ThinkPad, you should go here . On the Lenovo website, ThinkPad iron catalogs have been stored since 1992, that is, from the very beginning of production. There, for example, you can learn that in this particular model, the top and bottom panels are made of titanium - for durability and lightness.



Perhaps you will find there the original configuration of your model, but only if it was released for the US market. My laptop is European.



RAM, two strips of 128 megabytes. At some point, I decided to experiment with compatibility with DOS-games and registered in the download driver himem.sys. As a result, Windows stopped seeing memory beyond 65 megabytes (which is the limit for DOS). If possible, do not do so. On the left you can see the collective farm battery for the BIOS - this repair is necessary for absolutely all laptops over 15 years old, which have been idle for a long time.



A lot of connectors.



A lot of connectors! The only thing missing is the FireWire interface, to connect the Apple iPod released in the same year. Absolutely all browsers in all the journals in all Thinkpad reviews wrote the phrase “Unless FireWire is missing” from the moment the standard appeared until the final USB victory.

Install Windows 98 SE

T22 was delivered either with Windows 98, or with fresh Windows 2000. With Win2K I will work on another laptop, and here I will install just 98th. I have a sticker with a serial.



Unlike the Thinkpad T43, the T22 cannot boot from USB devices, so my optical drive emulator won't work. The fastest way to boot into DOS / Linux is to format the hard disk, transfer the base system files from the Win98 boot disk and rewrite the distribution. Then you can install the system by running setup.exe from DOS. For some reason, Scandisk from Win98 swore if I formatted the hard disk using Linux. Format natively, especially the team everyone remembers .



Together with the distribution is worth rewriting and drivers that can be taken here . There are some nice nuances. For example, there are two drivers for a sound system to choose from. The older one ensures compatibility when booting into a clean DOS. The younger one does not provide. Network drivers do not have an installer and require updating the drivers using the Device Manager. From the software it is worthwhile to put Hotkey Features Integration, On-Screen Display (special keys will work and an indication of what they are doing on the screen will appear), Battery Maximizer Utility (battery status and a widget for controlling the discharge), if desired - the ThinkPad Configuration Utility, although BIOS here without birds and all the settings shows and so.



The battery shows about half the capacity and works just over an hour. It is enough to move the laptop from the outlet to the outlet.

Making Windows 98 do something useful

Ok, we got a working system in which everything and nothing is working at the same time. The browser - Internet Explorer 5 - opens only the old sites (but quickly), with https is not at all friendly, and even on minimally complex http often drops. A fresh browser on a machine with 256 megabytes of RAM does not make much sense. For interest, I installed a new version of Opera (10xx) and after about three or four minutes I was able to download a relatively simple news site. This machine is not for the modern web.



OK, can we then go to the home file share for the purpose of file sharing? Also not, Windows 98 does not know that access requires not only a password, but also a username. I can not say that I have explored this path to the end, if you know about roundabout maneuvers - tell me. It is clear that you can share files without a password, share a folder in Windows 98 itself and access it from another computer, but instead I would prefer to build a separate server for Windows 98 that will be completely adequate to this era.


At the same time here's a nostalgic interface glitch.

Well, well, we also have USB, we will drive files on a flash drive, albeit slowly (no more than 1 megabyte per second). Yes, but not immediately. Windows 98 is Microsoft's first OS that supports USB. In practice, this means that it is capable of recognizing USB devices. And then, tadam, you need a driver. There are no universal drivers from the manufacturer (IBM), only for specific devices. Fortunately, there is a third-party driver package that provides support for flash drives, optical drives, USB keyboards, mice, and other standard peripherals. You can take it, for example, here (note that for Windows 98 of the original release and the version of SE drivers are different).



It all works quite well, taking into account the absurd nature of the 98th: fatal exception, blue screens and other cataclysms did not happen to me often, but they did happen. On another laptop, the wrong sequence of driver installation led to an incurable blue screen, it was easier to demolish than to figure it out. There is no customary protection for the user from modern Windows. Everything is possible, but you yourself are responsible for this.

Let me remind you that Windows 98 only supports disks in FAT32 format. NTFS support can be provided by Paragon's third-party program (for free!). She read a 128 gigabyte flash drive without any problems, but she didn’t handle the hard drive (its size probably affected). I prefer to use FAT32, so faster and more reliable.

Farther. From modern programs I need, I managed to install only Total Commander. You can use the VLC player to play videos and DVDs, IrfanView to view photos, but you need to look for old versions from about five years ago.



I return to my statement at the beginning of the post. The laptop of 2001 with Windows 98 is a trolley bus from bread. It is very similar to modern laptops in appearance, the Windows 98 interface, in general, is also not very different from reality, especially with the massive rejection of XP-style glazed bows. Very similar, but not working. I could finish the post with a typical passage for an old iron thread like “and now I sometimes use laptop X for my favorite games.” And yes, C & C for Windows (and DOS), MDK, Duke Nukem 3D and Quake work fine on it. But for me this trolley bus is a past stage, and I want to build another one.

About adequacy

If the Thinkpad T43, with some limitations, can be attracted to the modern digital environment, then the T22 is completely unsuitable for this. Instead of the joy of a workable old piece of iron, you get frustration and frustration. T22 wants to put in an environment where it feels good. For DOS-machines it is easy, just download the appropriate games and programs. Windows 98 belongs to the era of the early Internet, and this environment will have to be specially recreated for it. And what, it is an honorable task!

You can start by setting up a suitable local network environment, for which I plan to install Windows 2000 on another laptop (I chose T40, more powerful, the server after all). And then - we'll see. Proxy, broadcasting modern sites in 256-color images and frames? Interface to a web archive with realistic access to ancient versions of sites? Or create a local copy? Telephone emulator with modem access? BBS with Fido gash? Some more old laptops are waiting for the usual restoration and adjustment, but then I intend to build my own Internet for them, with preference and poetess. This makes it possible to give my hobby a little more meaning. And this is interesting.



But first I will try to set up Wi-Fi in Windows 98.