For some reason, it drags a bit on VirtualBox -- but my laptop is not all that powerful (and I didn't play with it all that much). How not powerful? Honestly I don't remember what processor is in it... says i7 VPro but that's the best I can tell you.

[quote="The REAL Real Man" post_id=134507 time=1675150381 user_id=2756]
I thought this was worth a new topic because... $UCCE$$! Well, mostly. And that's "success" without the "suc".[/quote]
In Scotland, Ireland and India, "cess" means a tax or levy. So I guess you'll tell us how taxing it was as it levied exorbitant demands on your time...
[quote="The REAL Real Man" post_id=134507 time=1675150381 user_id=2756]
I was hoping the Tecra had a boot-from-CD feature and it does. Yipee! Soooo, I pulled the ... 100 GB drive ... d-e-d DEAD...apparently it is very, very broken... I tried the 30 GB drive... I forgot how frackin' long it took ... Good thing that 100 GB drive didn't work; by the time it finished ... the oceans would have turned to yoghurt.[/quote]
After having to reinstall various versions of Windows 9X, I had a nick name for the process: "The Death Penalty", because it was like Capital Punishment, the worse thing one would have to endure.
[quote="The REAL Real Man" post_id=134507 time=1675150381 user_id=2756] The Tecra is now running Windows 98! And gosh, I'd forgotten how nicely it runs on a real computer with plenty of memory (128 MB, I believe) rather than in VirtualBox.[/quote]
I find that a bit hard to believe. A typical quad core processor today has four separate cores running, well, let's see, currently, the Tecra A30 DynaBook in the slowest one they sell now, is a Intel® Core™ i3-7100U processor (2.3GHz, 3M Cache), which makes it probably 20x as fast as yours, maybe more. I'm wondering what performance you'd get with a virtual machine with 200 MB real memory, the C drive assigned to a ramdisk, and the Virtualbox ran on a dedicated core all to itself. Today's hardware has machine virtualization built in, the virtual machine can run at processor speed.

I mean, sure, you might not know that much about computers internally, but set things up wrong and performance can drop below that of old machines. A really good software algorithm written on an older computer could possibly run faster than a really bad one done on current hardware. The one thing that can save it is that current computers can run [i]a lot[/i] faster than older machines, and we can throw resources like ;pts more memory, virtualized disks in ram, and SSD drives.

I never tried OS/2 Warp. That was the standard operating system at UPS for many years! A friend of mine worked there. I remember seeing boxes for it at Best Buy around 1998 but that's when I was really getting into Linux so I never spent any time with OS/2

PS, thinking of installing OS/2 Warp 4 on it...

I thought this was worth a new topic because... $UCCE$$! Well, mostly. And that's "success" without the "suc".

Happened to be in the storage unit todayyesterday, plunged my hand into a box with old computer stuff, and pulled out two floppy disks... one that said "Coronado Pictures" (haven't looked yet) and one that said "Book disk"!!!

I hooked up the frokky drive (that's what Jeff Hands used to call it) to the Toshiba, and it booted to a DOS prompt! Tried the C: drive, and it actually had data! Then I tried starting Windows, and it make a noise like there were a bunch of elves inside making Santa's toys with giant-to-them-but-tiny-to-us metal hammers. This rather comical effort ended in a BSOD of the sort I had not seen before.

Also, I looked at the pile of CDs I had cleaned out of my old desk earlier this week, and there it was -- an original Windows 98 Second Edition CD! Complete with warning: "Do not make illegal copies of this disc." Oh, don't worry, Microsoft, I won't -- I'm merely using it for an [i]illegal installation of your software[/i]. Bwa-ha-ha-ha-haaaaa!!! (Actually it's not illegal, the Tecra probably had a Win98 license...)

I was hoping the Tecra had a boot-from-CD feature and it does. Yipee! Soooo, I pulled the 6.4 GB drive, eyed the two that I had -- 30 GB ex-Mac drive from 2005, 100 GB drive from 2006 -- and chose the latter. Jinxed it by attaching all the screws, and of course the HD was d-e-d DEAD. After booting to the dos prompt from the Win98 CD, FDISK refused to even acknowledge its presence. "There is no fixed disk installed." Um, yes there is, Mr. Gates, but apparently it is very, very broken.

So, I tried the 30 GB drive and did NOT install all the screws, and sure enough, the computer recognized and formatted it.... and before I knew it, I was installing Windows 98!

I must say, I forgot how frackin' long it took to format a 30 GB IDE drive. Good thing that 100 GB drive didn't work; by the time it finished formatting, the sun would have fallen out of the sky and the oceans would have turned to yoghurt.

Installation went swimmingly, even though I had no drivers, but the upside is this: The Tecra is now running Windows 98! And gosh, I'd forgotten how nicely it runs on a real computer with plenty of memory (128 MB, I believe) rather than in VirtualBox.

Unfortunately. the track-point buttons have an old-sticky-rubber problem. Eew. I think a little alcohol will take care of that.

Next up: Drivers. So far I can't find my network-card dongle, and I might order a $10 PCMCIA WiFi card, but in the mean time this computer does have a USB slot and I am hoping that one of the dozens of USB drives I have will work. Funny to think that I have thrown away USB drives that had more capacity than the Tecra's original hard drive...

Once that's done, I have a copy of Office 97 all set to install! And I have to find a portable hard drive enclosure that is IDE-compatible. There is a full My Documents folder on that 6.4 GB hard drive, and I want to figure out what the heck I was writing about twenty years ago!

Next up: The Librex... unless someone comes up with an ADB mouse, in which case I might try one of the Macs.

TRM