A couple weeks ago, I rescued an old laptop from work which was destined for the rubbish bin, and managed to get it working again. Woo!! It's still in pretty good condition, considering the abuse it's probably taken over the past couple of years.

The screen is a bit dodgy though, you can see it's slowly wearing out when you tilt it towards or away from you, or if you fiddle with the brightness wheel on the side. Apart from that niggle though, everything else seems ok. At least it was free ;)

I decided that I was going to take the laptop to Canada with me, and give it to Emilee, who is in more need of a computer than I am (I already have 4 PCs plus a laptop!)

So, I formatted the hard drive and installed Windows 98SE onto it. Then downloaded all the drivers for it from Toshiba's website to get all the built-in hardware working. So far so good :)

Unfortunately it doesn't have a built-in network card, which would be incredibly useful, so I used the USB wireless NIC I have to get online - installed the drivers, plugged it in, checked the settings, and bingo!

Ran Windows Update, and sorted out the ton of updates that 98SE requires these days. Took bloody ages!! But at least it's a bit more secure now than it was! I still have to install a virus scanner on there - pretty much a requirement on any computer these days!

Em and I discussed a way to get her and her mum online at the same time, as her mum's PC runs 98SE I thought that ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) might be the simplest solution. This would require a network card for the laptop plus a NIC for the computer, and a crossover cable. Last night after work I went to PC World to check out the prices all these items. I picked up a PCMCIA network card for £27.99 (bargain!!) and a PCI NIC for £7.99 (another bargain!!)... while I was there I noticed a Labtec webcam for £19.99 - an amazingly low price, considering my cam cost me almost £55! I meant to get her a mouse too, but I forgot - DOH!!

Took all the stuff home, and fired up the laptop. Plugged in the PCMCIA network card, and grabbed the network cable from the back of my spare computer and connected it up. The laptop detected the card and asked for the drivers, so I inserted the CD and it installed them. My DHCP server kicked in and assigned the laptop an IP address and I could browse "DA InTArWEb" again. :)

Next I put in the CD for the webcam, and installed all the drivers off it. As it was running through all the installation scripts it had put an icon for RealPlayer 7 on the desktop. Version 7! That's very old now! They released an 8 (maybe a 9), then RealOne Player came out sometime last year. I uninstalled that pretty sharpish - it's a huge memory hog, not to mention the dodgy privacy policy it had at the time!

It asked me to reboot, so I did, and on startup it said "please insert the camera", so I did. Bing! It detected it properly and showed a preview window... and it all worked great :) I love it when technology actually works for once! :D

During lunch today, I walked to B&Q to get a cheap crossover cable, only £4.98 for 10 metres of CAT5 ethernet goodness! You can pay over £20 from Misco for a Belkin branded cable - what a complete waste of money!! The one from B&Q is probably the same quality and tons cheaper too! Talk about getting a bargain! :D

As my IPCop box had an old 10mbps combo network card in it, I took that out and replaced it with the new card I bought from PC World. My network should be running at 100mbps, and because that card needed upgrading, the whole network was suffering because of it. Now I've got all 10/100mbps cards and a 10/100mbps switch powering the lot :)

The developers of IPCop released version 1.3 only a couple of days ago, and I was running an old beta, so I was due an upgrade - good timing really, as I would've had to have reinstalled to change the NIC over anyway. While I had the top of the box off I removed the old SB16 and Voodoo2 cards that were in there which weren't doing anything at all. Now all that's in the case is what's needed. A video card, ISDN card, NIC, floppy drive, CDROM and a hard drive. I installed 1.3 without a hitch, luckily RealTek NIC chips are pretty well covered driver-wise in Linux :)

I couldn't use my backup floppy because of the change in NICs, so once the box was running, I went back to my PC and started inputting all the details again. I got a little lost on the Dialup screen as it had changed slightly from 1.2 but I got there in the end. I also set up my Ident server on the box, without a hitch :)

So all in all, I had a very good night for playing around with my computers and all the peripherals etc. Makes a change that things go right for once :)