Compaq Deskpro boards/hard drives from the late 1990s

On Tue, 27 Jul 2021 at 02:29, Grant Taylor via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: It was a fun and interesting project to do, actually, and made more enjoyable by the knowledge that I'd get paid for it. :-D The general idea lived on in many ways (almost certainly _not_ inspired by the article that came out of my work). 98Lite was a useful tool that let you strip unnecessary bits out of Win98 & 98SE: https://www.litepc.com/98lite.html I used this to run 98SE minus IE and other junk on my Thinkpad 701C, the famed "butterfly keyboard" laptop, for a while. It took more resources than 95, but it let me have more than 4 IP addresses, which was a hard limit in 95. Around 2000 I was travelling internationally with that laptop and needed networking via multiple Windows network adaptors: PCMCIA Ethernet, plus dial-up modem + PPP, plus AOL, plus Direct Cable Connection, plus IRDA for my cellphone, and that became a deal-breaker with Win95. That's 5 network adaptors and they can't all run TCP/IP, even if they're not active. 98Lite inspired N-Lite, which could do the same for NT derivatives, including WinXP. https://www.nliteos.com/nlite.html I used N-Lite to build a custom installation CD ISO for the volume-license edition of XP SP3, which left out all the MS internet tools except IE (which you needed for Windows Update), removed Movie Maker and some other cruft you can't uninstall, turned off the Themes engine and set the Classic theme and a few other things. It made for a smaller, cleaner installation that was entirely compatible and could be used and updated as normal. I also made one for my own use which moved /"Documents and Settings" onto another partition and so on, but you had to make the partitions _just so_ in advance which crippled it. I later discovered someone else had had the same idea and distributed it, under the name TinyXP. I had this running in a VM under Linux and in base form it took just 40MB of RAM. Even with IE, updates and antivirus I had it running in 70MB of RAM. It's long obsolete but there is a copy on the Internet Archive which AFAICT is clean: https://archive.org/details/TinyXPRev11MultiInclTinyBIIAndMicroXP086EXPerie… TinyXP became Tiny7: https://archive.org/details/Tiny7 ... but I think in deliberate retribution, Win7 SP1 needs a complete install and so you can't install SP1 on Tiny7. At this point, the creator, known as eXPerience, gave up. Damned shame IMHO -- I'd love to see a Tiny10. I have. :-) Interesting idea. For me, TBH, more trouble than it's worth. I mostly run Linux on my PC kit now. True. Even so, I have found that there's no perceptible difference, to me, on something like a Core i5 laptop, between / on SSD + /home on HDD, and the whole thing on SSD. Not easily. OS X dispenses with most of the Unix config files and it does not respond well if you try to half-nelson it into behaving like a traditional Unix. But after I emigrated to Czechia, I had enough money to stop using a Hackintosh and buy used Macintels. I moved my Toshiba laptop's 120GB SSD+ 1TB HDD into a Mac mini. I manually moved the home directory to the HDD and it worked fine. Until I bought the Retina iMac I am typing on, when I discovered I couldn't migrate my apps/settings/data. The migration tool can't handle a home directory on a different volume. And I couldn't reproduce the setup, as Apple fitted a 12GB SSD and you can't fit OS X onto that. So I had to manually copy everything, and then reset millions of files' permissions. It was a nightmarish job. Whatever works for you. I do not like LVM and I do not use encryption. :-D Only into the Windows era. After GUIs took over, they could handle logographic/ideographic writing systems just fine and the Japanese computer industry gradually converged onto the same standards as the Western world. It's a great shame IMHO. We need more diversity. I recently discovered an interesting example but maybe I should make it a new thread. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lproven at gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven ? Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 ? ?R (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053