Uppity Vaio

As mentioned in the preceeding post, while I was home I picked up an older Sony Vaio my parents had laying around. There seems to have been some confusion as to its nature, as one of them told me it was a P3 800Mhz, when it is actually a 233Mhz. That doesn't really matter much, as I don't really have any need for a laptop, and only planned to use it for occasional webwork or what-have-you, not for playing Doom 3 on the subway. Not that we have a subway. I could play in Subway.

Anyway.

The problem is that the PCMCIA CD-ROM doesn't seem to work, I don't have a driver disc for it, and I can't find drivers which seem to work. Without that, I can't install an operating system. It does have Win98SE on it right now, and I got a USB wireless network adapter (pilfered from my poor Tivo) running, but I would like to reformat and reinstall, to maximize whatever performance it's going to have. This is a little difficult without a CD drive.

My brother had the good idea of just pulling the hard drive, and doing the necessary work by installing it in D's computer, like I did with the Tivo, so I set about doing that. I managed to disassemble and reassemble the Vaio in less than an hour without incident, but unbeknownst to me (until now), laptop IDE connections are smaller than regular desktop IDE cables. Darn.

I'm going to fool around with getting network access to it from DOS, and if I can do that, maybe I can format and install Win98 over the network. If anyone knows how to do that, and/or has any clever ideas, I'd love to hear 'em.

Currently listening to: "Flugufrelsarinn", Sigur Rós