Windows 98, WiFi and Destruction Derby

I’ve been trawling through all my old equipment, trying to organise it in some meaningful manner. I decided to buy several clear storage cases in the hope of grouping related items together so I can easily select a box and its contents when I want to use certain hardware.

The process is going reasonably well although unsurprisingly I’ve underestimated the number of containers I require and one slightly irritating aspect has been finding lots of items that I didn’t realise I had and have bought duplicates of recently.

I did however unearth a D-link dwl G520+ wireless PCI card and my old Apple Airport Extreme unit. I installed the wireless card in my bridge machine which until now has lacked any form of networking and set up the Extreme to create a wireless network.

I was able to download drivers for the D-Link card and whilst I was at it I download drivers for the Leadtek Winfast Titanium 500 graphics card and Creative Labs Soundblaster Live which were already present in the bridge machine. All these drivers were still available from the respective manufacturer’s websites.

I have to say I’ve quite enjoyed using Windows 98 again, it’s relatively unfussy and very quick and snappy 0n the Pentium III I’m using. The driver installations went pretty smoothly and the D-Link card picked up the wireless network without fuss.

On firing up Internet Explorer I went into Tools/Internet Options/Connections and configured it to connect through my LAN however it wouldn’t connect to any web pages. After a bit of fiddling I entered ‘winipcfg’ in the Start/Run box and clicked on Release All and then Renew All, this did the trick, my freshly installed Windows 98 box was online.

This box now fulfils the list of criteria I set out for my perfect bridge machine:-

DOS
Parellel Port
Serial Port
ISA Slot
PCI Slots
USB
Network/Internet
VGA & DVI
CD Rom
Floppy (5.25 & 3.5)

I thought it might be amusing at this stage to try Windows Update which took me to the relevant site but would always fail with an error when scanning the system. After searching a bit I found this site which has an unofficial pack of updates.

After installing these updates I was able to access Windows Update again and it worked so I took all the official updates I thought would be useful and installed them. Pleased with my progress I thought I’d party like it was 1999 and fire up an old game. First to hand was Destruction Derby which in fact harks all the way back to 1995.