Interesting. Will it just say DS#### on the chip on the board? I’ll look for it, that sounds great. Some parts of this board are hard to reach though.

This is what I was thinking too. The adapter I have does have its own power supply plugged in to molex. But it turns off when I also plug in usb.

I can’t find the coin cell cmos battery on the board…

We’ll see how far I get. I mean if I can just do copy file \\.\COM# on the DOS side and cat /dev/tty# > file on my laptop side then I’ll be happy.

Thanks for that. Looked online a bit, I’m going to order an rs232 to usb null modem cable. Then it looks like in DOS I should be able to set the baud and just copy a file to the port. On the receiving side I can program something to just read from the com port straight to a file. Add some automation and voila. 🤞

Right now the challenge is to get data off of my 5.25" floppy disks. Online shops are full of 3.5" to usb readers, but nothing for 5.25".

The reader in the computer still works.

I’m considering trying to send files out through the serial port, if I can figure out how to send a file to it. Then I could use anything to read from the other end of the serial port and write the file.

I want to see what (if anything) i can copy from the drive, and then I’ll give this a shot and see how much mileage I can get out of it!

The gotek looks like a cool way to add usb storage support. I’m hesitant only because this thing boots from the 3.5" drive right now so I don’t want to touch that, but if I fix the hard drive problems and it boots from there then I might do this.

I do want to get an SSD in here, a friend of mine has done it before on a similarly old windows 98 system.

I can try it out once i learn how to use this thing. I’m gonna have to get a usb floppy reader/writer to copy stuff from a modern computer.

Interesting, I do have some floppy disks that claim to be ms-dos. I also have some windows 95 and 98 cds. The hard drive isn’t making any click of death sounds as far as I can tell, but I haven’t exercised it. I just know the stuff currently on it is corrupted since I get read errors trying to exec anything. I wrote a text file, was able to read it back, so reinstalling might work, but i think a whole new drive would be best.

I saw that the bios lets me change the cpu speed to fast/slow, does that have anything to do with the turbo you think?

Just saw your edit! I’ll look into that!

Yea this thing needs a new drive. Trying to run any programs on it gives me read errors. I need to figure out what linux it could run. I’m comfortable with linux, but not with this kind of hardware.

I don’t know. I haven’t found any info on its original specs.

Ah, I think I did read that somewhere. This one is still kicking though. I dug it out of my brother’s attic last year and finally got around to powering it on.

Is it bad? 😂 I don’t know anything about these old machines, but it works and I’ll see how much I can do with it.

Confirmed

This is what I was thinking. For a first iteration to get out the door immediately it could just be windows with a “game browser” that launches full screen when you turn it on 😂

They change it all the time for funsies

Who’s Joe

The guy in charge of this place

No they’re not. And the tech literate people that will see that they can disable this protection and continue as normal.

Microsoft doesn’t always do good things, but I think this is fine. If you open firefox it’ll ask you if you want to set your default browser, and it won’t regedit for you. It will open up the proper windows menu that lets you set firefox as the default.

Not letting malware change your settings by default is a GOOD thing. It is also a good thing that advanced users can disable the feature.

The only bad thing about the story is the lack of transparency. Having to find out about it by breaking tools is bad. It would be better if they had a changelog for these updates that say what they do so admins can see if their tools will be affected.