Journey of installing nostalgia
I recently got my hands on three laptops, a Sony Vaio and two Compaq Presario's. I decided to revive all three of these. This is a small documenting of that process.
Sony Vaio
The best of the three by far. It featured a SSD and a nice processor. It originally came with Windows 7 Home Premium, it now ran Windows 11 through free upgrades. I actually wanted it back on Windows 7 for me. So I grabbed a Windows 7 ISO, made a bootable USB. I did not have my burner handy. So then plugged the USB in, and booted it. Went through the install and it got stuck at the partition screen. I searched high and low, and somewhere through the article I was reading it casually mentioned to:
unplug the USB stick for 15-30 seconds and try again.
I did this and lo and behold it worked. I installed everything, then I wanted to install everything in terms of updates. Windows Update itself does not work, but you can manually download all the needed files luckily. No browser works out of the box since many SSL updates are missing and the browser itself cannot handle the newest TLS connections. So luckily for me there is this person that maintains the Thorium Browser, and it has SSE3 builds for Windows 7. So I was able to download and install that, and now I can browse the modern web from my Windows 7 laptop. I immediately customised it by setting the colours, fonts (Victor Mono), desktop background and sound profile. Then I installed the games I have from my GOG account. I can now play Commander Keen, Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure but also Dorfromantik (on low settings mind you).
I also installed the latest Powershell in order to use Scoop to get packages and that works like a charm too. What I want to try in the future is to get it fully customised with Windows Ultimate Customiser to make it Catppuccin like.
So success after a small hurdle.
Compaq Presario CQ57
This one I struggled a bit with. Same bootable USB, same problem. The fix did not work this time though. That was harsh. So I decided to try netboot.xyz. I have a spare router (MikroTik) laying around so I could easily configure that to serve the PXE bootfile and therefore I could boot the laptop via PXE into Windows 7 install setup. It could not load the drivers though and the net use command was not available since the ethernet card was being used for the PXE. I plugged in the USB stick and everything worked. Went through to the full install. Then I wanted to install the Windows Updates again but since it was a few days in between I forgot how I fully did it. I messed up the order of updates and bricked the system. So back to square one, PXE boot, reinstall and this time just try again.
Just for good measure:
- Download SP1 plus a single update. Install in ascending order of numbered updates.
- Download SP2 plus a single update. Install in ascending order of numbered updates.
That is it really. Then everything works. I also installed Wufuc to get the final few extra updates.
Installed all the games again and this one is for my children to play games on.
Compaq Presario CQ60
For this one I wanted to try something ridiculous. I did not have an idea yet until I gave the previous one to my children. I thought they could game unsupervised but you can push too many random buttons and clicks to make it go bad, so I decided I would give them the same(ish) environment I had when I grew up. MS-DOS. Although in this case I did FreeDOS, because true MS-DOS on modern hardware will not run as nicely.
FreeDOS 1.3 full install went great. I had a working system. I had my games from GOG but I could not just do the same install procedure. I did not look into WiFi drivers yet for FreeDOS but I could of course make the Ethernet work. Sadly that does not make it browse the web quite so easily.
So I just copied the relevant files over to my bootable FreeDOS USB drive and then copied it over to my actual HDD. There is this USBDRV program I could run to automatically do USB drives but there is very little documentation and I did not want to delve into it quite yet.
Then I noticed the sound was only coming from the PC speaker. I thought it would be nice to get a real speaker going. Again it is just modern hardware with modern audio chips. Luckily for me someone already did all the hard work and made a virtual soundblaster card. Basically a program that sits as a proxy that can talk to the Intel HDA chip and make it appear as a SoundBlaster Pro or 16. Via a YouTube video I found the instructions I needed to do, and after some tweaks I got it to work.
I now have the correct sound setup for most of the games it just works.
So now I can let my children play Hocus Pocus, Commander Keen and Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure in the same manner as I did when I was a child.
The only thing I have to do is customise the prompt. There is not a lot to customise but enough to make it our own.
Conclusion
I really liked this project. It brought me back in time, and also allows me to play the games I like without too much hassle.