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OK, I got my new motherboards today. They are a lovely purple colour. I put one on the desk, stuck a stick of ram in it, a video card and my nice Duron 700 CPU. I bridged the pins on the motherboard to get the power going and it posted right away! There is a beeper built into the motherboard which is very nice.
So I put in a hard drive and it booted to an ancient version of Ubuntu (10.10), but was quite slow with only 256 mb of ram. I put in three 256 mb chips and it was actually quite responsive.
I tried to load Win XP, but on the GRUB menu it doesn't seem to like the USB keyboard for some reason.
So the next phase will be to put it in a case, hook up optical drives and 3.5" floppy and install Win Me.
Amazingly the BIOS has support for all sorts of floppy drives, 5.25" and even 2.88 Mb 3.5" for example.
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(16-11-2021, 06:21 PM)TygerTung Wrote: OK, I got my new motherboards today. They are a lovely purple colour. I put one on the desk, stuck a stick of ram in it, a video card and my nice Duron 700 CPU. I bridged the pins on the motherboard to get the power going and it posted right away! There is a beeper built into the motherboard which is very nice.
So I put in a hard drive and it booted to an ancient version of Ubuntu (10.10), but was quite slow with only 256 mb of ram. I put in three 256 mb chips and it was actually quite responsive.
I tried to load Win XP, but on the GRUB menu it doesn't seem to like the USB keyboard for some reason.
So the next phase will be to put it in a case, hook up optical drives and 3.5" floppy and install Win Me.
Amazingly the BIOS has support for all sorts of floppy drives, 5.25" and even 2.88 Mb 3.5" for example. Lol looks like you might be in for a fun time.
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(16-11-2021, 12:01 PM)TygerTung Wrote: (15-11-2021, 06:39 PM)Me+Me Wrote: Y'know I wouldn't be surprised if you don't remember now, (we tend to 'bury' memories of bad events to protect our sanity), but it was probably Win ME that caused you to swing over to what we now know as 'The Dark Side' - AKA Linux.
And with that consequence in mind I dunno if you should return to Win ME - you could have something serious happen this time !
(16-11-2021, 08:22 AM)king1 Wrote: They need to write data to drives TygerTung, that's the way operating systems work...
I hope you're not going to turn this into another windows is so slow compared to linux on my 20 year old hardware thread.  We kinda did that one to death on TM...
No, this in a Windows thread, no point comparing Linux. Linux has a different design architecture to Windows, the two can't really be compared.
This thread is about Windows Me, and finding out if it is really the worst version of Windows so far. I always thought that it was widely agreed upon many that ME was the worst.
This kid did the right thing.
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I've had an issue where the new motherboard is full size ATX whereas the case is micro ATX. I don't seem to have any ATX cases lying around. I guess I will have to hack something out of wood as I don't really want to spend any money.
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(16-11-2021, 09:59 PM)TygerTung Wrote: I've had an issue where the new motherboard is full size ATX whereas the case is micro ATX. I don't seem to have any ATX cases lying around. I guess I will have to hack something out of wood as I don't really want to spend any money. Meh you don't even need a case.  Just lay it all out on the bench !
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It currently is all laid out on the bench, but not convenient for long term use. I'm getting a second hand case from the local electronics recycler today. I got a text message yesterday afternoon saying they had some large tower cases for me. I'm not sure how large I'd need as the motherboard only has provision for 4 IDE devices, so would need a daughterboard for more I guess.
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18-11-2021, 07:29 AM
(This post was last modified: 18-11-2021, 07:30 AM by king1.)
what are your plans for this build if you need more than 4 ide slots ?
the ATX motherboards are 305mm x 244mm, micro-atx 244 × 244 mm
The tower cases usually support one or both, you can usually tell by the number of slots on the back of the case - 3-4 rear slots is usually a micro-atx case only, 6 or more is ATX and usually micro-atx as well
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I don't really need more than 4 IDE devices, maybe 2 optical drives and 2 hard drives. Just the recycling centre said they had "large" towers, so may as well fill it with something?
It is a full size ATX motherboard; it doesn't fit in any of my current cases.
I remember seeing some enormous cases back in the day; I can only assume they used daughterboards in PCI slots to get more I/Os for more drives.
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Unfortunately I am having issues now with the new boards. The one which was working is completely unresponsive to the power switch and appears dead. The other one which shows some signs of life gives video card error beeps no matter what video card I try in it.
I don't have any PCI video cards, only AGP ones.
I have a new tower case now from ECOTECH services, but I might have to replace the CMOS battery holder in my spare P4 motherboard and use that instead if I can't get these ECS AMD motherboards going.
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OK, I have got Windows ME installed on a machine. I removed the CMOS battery holder off of my dead Compaq motherboard and replaced the broken CMOS battery holder on my spare P4 motherboard, however the spare P4 motherboard seems to be dead. The CPU fan just goes full speed and there is no signs of life from the video output or CMOS beep codes, and the I/O chip gets really hot.
So I have had to use my main P4 motherboard.
I managed to get Windows ME installed, it is a bit tricky as the installer CD is funny about hard disk formatting. I put the boot floppy image onto a floppy disc (from Windows XP), however even this was a bit of a mission as the floppy drive I was using was actually a bit faulty and had misaligned heads, so I used another one which was not as nice looking.
But the fdisk.exe programme wouldn't let me format the hard drive as it asked me to enter the volume label, but I couldn't write lower case characters!
So had to go back into XP, reformat it twice, give it a label with upper case characters and then format it in fdisc.
I had originally formatted it in FAT32 in Linux, but the WinME installer didn't like it.
When originally doing the installation, I had 1.5 GB of RAM only in the machine. It installed fine (pretty quickly too) and booted into ME. So I tried putting the full 2.5 GB of RAM in, but ME didn't like it and would crash on boot.
It was a bit unstable on 1.5 GB, so I reduced it to 1 GB, which was more stable, and have now reduced to 512 GB which is optimal.
Win ME runs real fast. I have managed to get some of the drivers for my hardware, and am currently trying to get the LAN sorted.
Pictures open instantly, much faster than W10.
The machine is pretty fast though, it is a 3.2 GHz Pentium 4, with 512 GB of RAM and a 40 GB hard drive which is much faster than required.
Microsoft has a recommended system requirements of a Pentium II, 300 MHz with 64 MB of RAM and 2 GB of free space.
Will use K-Meleon for the browser when I get it connected.
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Lol you're a glutton for punishment - but well done. Projects such as that are a great way to learn stuff and can be fun and rewarding if you have the time and inclination
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OK, I actually plugged in the network cable now and it actually works. Will just have to try and find a browser which works as the Internet Explorer from the year 2000 doesn't like HTTPS sites.
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I can't imagine there will be any... everything requires ssl now so i'm quite sure you will have to do some certificate jiggery-pokery... This might help though
http://retrosystemsrevival.blogspot.com/...ndows.html
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24-11-2021, 12:18 PM
(This post was last modified: 24-11-2021, 12:22 PM by Me+Me.)
(24-11-2021, 09:47 AM)TygerTung Wrote: OK, I actually plugged in the network cable now and it actually works. Will just have to try and find a browser which works as the Internet Explorer from the year 2000 doesn't like HTTPS sites. Our ancient XP Home Ed computer at work, (P4 + 1GB etc), runs FireFox well enough and that seems to get most if not all websites.  I don't use it much for websurfing so theres quite possibly sites it wont get to but I'm not aware of those.   Sorry not there so can't tell you what verson of FF it is.......
ah from an earlier post of mine in this thread:
currently running Firefox version 52.9
I have no idea what the latest version it'll run is as i haven't tried updating it.  Work wont pay tech rates so I do very little tech work, (it's not what I'm employed for).
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Yeah it is fine if it is running XP as XP runs on the new MS framework, NT based. Win Me is W9x based so it is harder to get browsers.
I have got to the stage where all the drivers I need are the onboard audio (don't really need it as I have a soundcard, but I don't like seeing the yellow triangles in the device manager) and the wireless internet card, so I can use WIFI.
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lol from here
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/780259
Latest supported FF on ME is v2.0.0.20
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(24-11-2021, 02:23 PM)king1 Wrote: lol from here
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/780259
Latest supported FF on ME is v2.0.0.20 Lol, in 2010, I still had clients running 98 and ME and would have installed that version on their computers at the time I was telling them an upgrade was way overdue.
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Windows ME has a very nice interface. It reminds of a lot of XP on "classic" theme. It doesn't have a search function in the start menu though which I miss a little so I have to manually check all of the programmes to find the one I want.
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OK, so I got a couple more of those ECS motherboards and the first one I tried works fine.
I have been installing Win Me and it is real fast, but it is extremely easy to completely break the system. Install the wrong patch, it goes bad. Install SpeedFan, won't boot without crashing.
It goes fine, but I usually have to reinstall every day. I am having issues with hard drive corruption. Not sure if it is caused by Windows locking up and having to do a forced restart, or the incredibly ancient 40gb hard drives I am using failing.
Windows Me is nice in that it boots and shuts down extremely fast and has a very nice interface, but the stability seems to be sub-optimal. Maybe the FAT32 drive structure is not as good. I think I need to find a more reliable hard drive.
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