Further adventures in tech support
 

A friend of mine has an aging Dell Pentium II that's having Windows issues; it abruptly locking up on booting, booting okay in safe mode. I futzed around with disabling parts of system.ini and win.ini until it booted vaguely normally, though there are still some issues. I decided that the best thing to do would be to add a second hard drive as the new primary, put a fresh coat of 98SE on that, put the old drive on as the slave drive and reinstall the apps. Seemed like a good idea at the time.

So I dug up a used 10GB drive, got some mounting rails to screw onto it, and opened the case... only to find nowhere to put a second drive. There's a funky enclosure on the front of the case where the "main" HD screws in, and nowhere that I can find that the second drive can go. (Friend: "Couldn't you just lay it on the bottom of the case?" Me: "No.")

Okay, so the two-drive solution isn't a go. Plan B: Install the new drive and put 98SE on that, as much to verify that the new drive is good as anything else, and worry about copying files over from the old drive later.

I install the drive, boot from the CD-ROM, install 98SE, so far so good. Next up: install the Verizon Online software so that I can get to the web and download the rest of the driver files.

Verizon's installer starts up, coughs and dies with a "You must have at least 800x600 resolution to run this app" message. So... I need video drivers in order to get online to download the video drivers. ARGH!

So I put everything back the way it was, and am now working on digging up Diamond Viper V550 drivers and some way of getting the second drive in the system.

Or I could just nag him into buying a new computer.

If it's Verizon DSL, you can get a DSL router (I use a LinkSys DSL Router/Firewall), and you don't even need to install the Verizon software.

Just nag him to get a new one. Copy as many files as he needs to a cd (if he has a burner) or a usb flash drive. He can get a brand new Dell for under $400, or instead of trying to fix his old one, have him pay you to build a new bare bones one since it sounds like this guy isn't exactly a power user who needs the latest and greatest.

Yep, as long as you have a working drive for the ethernet card in the computer!

Which you do, if you have Windows installed, or the Windows CD.

With a Pentium II machine and Windows 98, I wouldn't bet on it. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's not a given.

Actually, the first thing I installed was the Linksys driver for the ethernet card. That I did have a CD for.

Ouch. At the least, you can get a DSL router for him so the PC has to do less work firewalling out traffic :).

You'd be wise to do that, and at the least drop some more RAM in there.

I have a Dell Pentium II 300 and Pentium III 1Ghz here at home. The only difference is I run a STB Velocity 128 in the older Dell.

If you want, I have an nVidia Quadro 2 MX card. At least that will make the video part less painful.