Ugh. Don’t use Windows 98….

Ok, it seems like it would be easy enough to put Win98 on my old laptop so I can read this crappy proprietary Sony audio format. As a bonus, I may be able to play Final Fantasy VII which so far I’ve been unable to play through emulation. Sounds good, in theory.

So, I try to install Win98…. and it fails utterly. It can’t even partition the hard drive to format it. Blech. So, somewhere around the house is a WinNT 4 CD; I partition through that, then go back to 98. It still can’t read the drive, but at least this time it’s capable of deleting the partition and starting over. THEN I can use fdisk.exe at the command prompt to format the drive and begin to install.

Mastercard spoof

Forty-five minutes later, I come back, and it’s finally finishing up. Of course, it fails miserably to bring the network up, but I kind of expected that. And it gave a slew of errors trying to bring up the IR port, but I’m not interested in using it.

So, USB…. Anybody got USB? Not on Windows 98, apparently. I put in my USB flash drive: “Would you like to add a driver for Unknown Device?” Why, certainly. It sounds like a start, anyway. So it searches the whole Win98 install CD and can’t find a driver. Ok, no problem, I’ll just download one. D’oh…. no network.

So I go to the Alcove labs and download one, and burn it on a CD-RW. Stick it in my laptop: Drive D is inaccessible. Oh. Try again; same result. The CD isn’t scratched or anything, it just turns out Windows XP is incapable of burning CDs that Windows 98 can read. I’m not making this up! And since I’m locked out of installing any useful software on the Alcove machines, I head over to the other labs, where I use a Mac, the only machine I have access to that can burn a CD for my Windows laptop. Loving the irony.

Then I run the driver installer from the CD. Ok, driver installed. Now plug in the device, and it will detect it. In the USB drive goes, and up pops the originnal “Would you like to add a driver for Unknown Device?” Um…. yes, you bastard, that’s what I’m trying to do. The installer from the CD sits there like a dimwit, waiting for what has already happened.

Well, when all else fails, read the documentation. Double-click on the driver’s readme.doc: Wordpad – This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. If the problem persists, contact the program vendor. Well, if by “contact the program vendor” you mean “sling a barrage of profanity at Microsoft,” I’m awfully tempted, but I’ll pass, thanks.

On the plus side, at least Final Fantasy works. I’m considering charging triple for my work when it involves using Windows.