2026-05-26 08:00:00
I love the Windows 98 era of computing and gaming, but until now I didn't really have a good Windows 98 computer. Old Pentium systems are increasingly hard to come by and expensive, especially if you also want to have a period correct GPU like a 3dfx Voodoo card. Not to mention that a desktop PC takes up a lot of space. But there are still lots of systems on the market that can be found for very little money, and thanks to modern patches and drivers Windows 98 can be made to run on hardware much newer than the system itself. With that in mind, I recently got a Thinkpad T41 from Ebay specifically for running Windows 98, and it runs great.
So this is the Thinkpad. It's in decent condition, the top cover is kind of ugly because it is coated in a type of soft rubber that has a lot of scratches and feels a bit sticky, but otherwise it's in good shape. The battery even still holds a charge, if only for 20 minutes or so. But after more than 20 years, that's still impressive. It's a 2003 model with a 1,7GHz Pentium M, 1,5GB RAM, a Radeon 7500 GPU and it shipped originally with Windows XP, so on paper it's too new to run Windows 98, but interestingly there were still drivers available from IBM for Windows 98, so it was still officially supported.
I set it up with Windows 98 Quickinstall, which is hands down the easiest and fastest way to get Windows 98 installed today. It comes with a lot of patches and drivers already installed and can be installed in a few minutes.
The Thinkpad has a still working optical drive and can even boot from USB, so I could have burned the ISO image on a CD or written it to a USB drive and installed it this way, but I decided to take a different route, just to see if it's possible.
I pulled the hard drive out of the laptop and connected it to my desktop computer via a SATA - USB adapter. Next I created a Virtualbox VM without a virtual hard drive just for this purpose, booted the Windows 98 Quickinstall ISO in this VM and mounted the Thinkpad's hard drive in it (Virtualbox allows connecting USB devices to a virtual machine). Then I ran through the 98 Quickinstall setup where I selected the USB-connected physical hard disk as the installation target. This works because 98 Quickinstall boots a minimal Linux distro, which comes with USB drivers, and writes a preconfigured Windows 98 image to the hard drive.
After that was done, which only took a few seconds, the machine should be rebooted from the hard drive. I didn't do this however; instead I just powered off the VM, disconnected the hard drive and put it back in the Thinkpad so that the very first boot of Windows 98 was already on the correct hardware. This is important because Windows 98 configures itself for the hardware it runs on on the first boot after installation, and I wanted it to see the correct hardware and not the virtual machine.
As expected, it booted up without any issues on the Thinkpad. 1,5GB is normally too much memory for Windows 98, but this installation is already patched to work with more than 512MB of memory, so that's not an issue. It detected some hardware out of the box, for other components I had to get the drivers from here and installed them by hand, which worked flawlessly. I couldn't get the Wifi drivers to work, but that's fine because I can get the computer online via my phone.
And there it is, my new Windows 98 machine. Both CPU and GPU are way overpowered for this era of computing, so I expect pretty much everything I throw at it to run without any issues, unless there are some weird driver incompatibilities, but so far I haven't encountered any. One thing I have encountered is a stupid limitation of the keyboard; when I press too many keys at once, the machine freezes for a split second and beeps at me. This is a well known limitation of Thinkpads of this era and a design flaw of the keyboard matrix. For gaming that's of course not ideal, but I've gotten used to working around it and I can still use an external keyboard if it gets too annoying.
One thing that's missing is a game port, so no 90s joysticks/gamepads for now, but there are solutions for this problem, too. And curiously the keyboard doesn't have a Windows key. I don't think I've ever encountered a keyboard made after 1995 that doesn't have a Windows key, but for whatever reason IBM seems to have decided that their computers don't need one. I disagree, because I use it frequently, but hey. You get used to it.
Overall, I really like this computer. It runs well, doesn't take up a lot of space, and being a Thinkpad it's built with repairability and serviceability in mind, so if anything breaks it can be swapped out easily. There are even still aftermarket batteries available, so I might get one of those and have a fully portable 90s laptop, which I think is awesome.
2026-05-22 08:00:00
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2026-05-21 08:00:00
I enjoy playing around with old computers and software from the 90s and early 2000s. My childhood computer was the Amiga 500 which I still have and which I love dearly, but the Windows 9x/XP era of computing is the most nostalgic for me because this coincides with my teenage years and my early 20s, and there are just so many great things about it; 3dfx games, the early internet, Napster, ICQ, Winamp... it was a fascinating time in tech.
One problem with computers from this time period is how to get them online. They either have no wifi or severely outdated wifi modules which at best do WEP encryption, but they can't connect to a modern WPA encrypted wifi network. So in order to get them online you would either have to downgrade the security of your wifi network (terrible idea), set up a dedicated wifi network for these machines with only WEP security enabled (also terrible) or connect them via ethernet, which is easy enough as long as you have an Ethernet connection available.
But what if you want to get an old Windows 9x/XP-era computer online somewhere where there is no ethernet connection? Here's a deceptively simple way to do it:
And that's it. As long as you have automatic network configuration via DHCP enabled on the PC, the phone should automatically assign an IP address to the PC and bridge its wifi connection to the wired network through the Ethernet adapter. And this should work with every old (and new) computer, as long it has an Ethernet port.
I admit, it's not the prettiest of solutions (I need to get a shorter Ethernet cable), but it works and it's really simple to set up. So why did it take me so long to figure this out? I have no idea.
I tested this with a USB-C docking station which has an Ethernet port too, and it worked just as well, but required external power to the docking station, meaning an extra power cable is required.
I don't have an iPhone, so I have no idea if it would work with iOS, too.
2026-05-15 08:00:00
Last week I shared a post by David about backing up his blog. Except, due to a brain fart on my part, I called him Glyn, who is someone else entirely. Why? I have no idea... maybe I started writing the post before I had coffee. Thankfully people are paying more attention to what I write here than I am, because not long after I posted, I got a message from David asking why I called him Glyn. And almost at the same time I got a message from Glyn, asking why I called David by his name. So we went back and forth a bit on Mastodon, which led to quite an amusing morning last week. Moral of the story? If you want people to get in touch with you, mess up their names!
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2026-05-08 08:00:00
Recently I've been struggling to find things to write in the intro of these posts, or finding things to write on the blog in general. I'm kind of in a creative slump it seems... and I don't really know what to do about it except wait it out and see when the creativity comes back. Don't worry, the linkdumps aren't going to stop, but they might appear without an intro sometimes. I think it's better to do it this way rather than try and force myself to come up with something just for the sake of having an intro.
Also, I did an update on my laptop a few days ago and now palm rejection of the touchpad doesn't work anymore, and the mouse curse jumps around randomly as I type and my palm touches the touchpad. It's not annoying at all! Thanks, Arch Linux.
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2026-05-01 08:00:00
It's time somebody invented beaming. And it doesn't have to be beaming a person at first, though that would be ideal... but maybe we could start with small objects. For example, I usually write these posts at my favourite café downtown. But I haven't been feeling too well the last couple of days, so I have to stay home. And now it would be awesome to have a small beaming device, maybe the size of a microwave, where I can put in an empty coffee mug and beam it down to the café where they fill it up and send me back a nice hot cup of coffee. Why has nobody invented this yet?
And yes, I know I can just buy a good coffee machine and get the same result, but you know... it would be so much cooler if they could beam a cup of coffee straight to my kitchen. A man can dream.
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