I got a new (to me) laptop this week: the ThinkPad R32 from 2001 in the 1.6GHz Pentium 4 with 256MiB RAM configuration.
It arrived running the Dutch version of XP SP3 and both NOD32 and Norton, from the 5400 rpm Travelstar drive.
I replaced the mechanical hard drive with a mSATA SSD on an IDE adaptor caddy. Then I booted 9x QuickInstall from a floppy and imaged with Windows 98.
Then off to install some classic games and programs!
At least that is the romanticized version of events. In reality I spent a whole evening debugging why I couldn't get anything to boot.
The BIOS doesn't support booting from USB, so I was using the Plop bootloader to chainload.
This sort of worked, in that the next bootloader would start, and that could load the kernel and initrd, but then farther along in the boot USB I/O would fail, grinding everything to a halt.
I eventually figured out the USB stick I was using was too new, and it was handling some USB 1.0 state differently than the USB controller was expecting.
Switched to an ancient USB stick I found lying around and things worked!
I think I'd call getting to this point "pain and suffering" as softpipe slowly tries to render the UI.
Plasma's UI is much more responsive in Wayland, I just can't launch any applications.
The R32 had a SKU with wireless, but this model did not come equipped, but it did retain the Mini-PCI (not Mini-PCIe) slot.
I picked up an Atheros AR922X Mini-PCI card and the flat antennas just arrived.
The BIOS has an allowlist of wireless cards, which the AR922X is much too new. I found a firmware with the check disabled, but the author notes the BIOS still has the radio disable pin set.
Fortunately the AR922X seems to ignore this pin, as the radio works.
Unfortunately, it seems there are no Windows 98 drivers for this card. I guess I should look for a slightly older 802.11b/g card instead?
I ended up breaking a clip and I've decided not to continue, as I think I can install the antennas elsewhere on the chassis.
The Atheros AR9223 Mini-PCI card works fine in Windows XP. You can't even tell I installed new antennas to make it "Wireless LAN" ready.
Yes, this is the IPv6 version. If you know, you rock.
I'm looking for recommendations of good BBS/telnet clients and Gopher/Gemini browsers that work on XP. It would be awesome if Dillo worked here.
@terinjokes PuTTY is my win terminal of choice, i think there's an old but still fairly modern version that supports xp?
@mavica_again I was thinking something along the lines of Qmodem Pro (or the modern OS clone, Qmodem)
@terinjokes oh looks like the very latest version still supports xp!