Back in Business

My old beater laptop rides again. My secondary system, a 366mhz P2 IBM Thinkpad - which is very well built system that I highly recommend - lost contact with the world a couple of weeks ago when the computer's wifi card died.

I purchased another - a D-Link (it was cheap, but I hate this company) - and the new card wouldn't work. I decided to do a complete wipe of the drive to see if that was then problem, downloaded a pirate copy of Windows 98 from Bittorrent and reinstalled. Still no luck with the wifi card.

It turns out that the folks at D-Link branded this card as being compatible with Win 98 - and it is, but only if you go through a rather extreme proceedure in MS DOS mode that involves renaming a root file. Shysters is my name for the D-Link people. It works really well now, but only if you're a geek willing to put in the time. And, while I feel a sense of accomplishment about it, there's no excuse for that company's shoddy excuse for a Win 98 driver.

I also downloaded Open Office, Firefox and Audacity, which are all freeware and open source. If I knew how to make Linux work with this wifi card I'd be all over it. I might even swap my trusty mac osx desktop for Linux one day.