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I have new toys


BenoitRen

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I went to a flea market today that was taking place in a neighboring village. There's always interesting stuff to be found there. Today was an especially fruitful day, though. Aside from a DVD that looked interesting, I bought

-Zoomcam USB (model 1595)

-Genius EasyPen

The Zoomcam USB is a video camera (nowadays called 'webcams') for Windows 95/98. Of course, for Windows 95, you need at least the B version. It comes with some software: Jasc Paint Shop Pro, NetMeeting, and (yuck) Internet Explorer. I haven't tried it yet. It cost me 1 euro.

The Genius EasyPen is a tablet that connects to a COM port. The seller said it worked on XP, but he wasn't sure about Vista (like I care :P). He mentioned that it also works on 98. I asked if it worked on 95. He didn't know. There was no instruction manual to look at. I could look on the Internet for drivers, as there was no install disk. Eh, if it wouldn't work on 95, I always have my 98SE PC. So I bought it. It was advertised as costing 11 euros, but the man offered it to me for 10 euros instead. I guess he thought "oh, what difference is one euro going to make?".

There was a driver for Windows 95 on the site. So I tried to install it tonight after watching TV. I connected it, and upon reboot Windows 95 detected a PnP Tablet. Cool. It didn't find any drivers, though. I installed the drivers I got from the website. Strange wizard. After confirming my choice of tablet model, it says "The device must be connected!", and you can choose Yes or No. Choosing Yes closes the wizard. Choosing No lets you continue. After rebooting, before showing the desktop, Windows complains about a damaged gtablet.vxd file. Weird. Booting completes, Windows detects my tablet and finds the driver. It won't work yet, though. I rebooted again, same error. Tablet still wouldn't work. I uninstalled the driver and tried again. No go.

I tried extracting the cabs myself. Invalid cab files. Thinking that maybe I got a bad download, I cleared my cache and redownloaded the drivers. Still invalid cab files. I searched my HD for the VXD, and it was where it should be, but the file name was in all caps. I renamed it to lower case, rebooted, and still nothing.

I remembered that the site offered generic drivers for the tablet, so I downloaded those. I looked at the setup program, but since the vxd and such were all extracted, I instead pointed the Windows hardware wizard to it. My tablet still didn't work, so I tried rebooting. Now my tablet's light remained active, and it worked! Woohoo! This sure is a neat device. And it works on my primary machine!

So, uh, share my joy? :P

Anyone else picked up cheap hardware for their 'orphaned' OS?

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Nice to read that Ben!

I also have a couple of new toys:

-KVM switcher

-Offline Power unit (600W)

;) Both w98/95 compatible! :D

With the KVM switcher I can switch from one computer to another from a hot keyboard combination. Very cool.

I can swith from the "XP" computer to and from the "W98" computer. That's my way to "dual-boot". ;):)

It works well but behave wierd when you are not used to it. For example the diplay shut off if no keyboard is connected to the switch. Also my computer was set up to switch on by pressing any key on the keyboard, but the toggle key combination would switch it on.

That's a rare stuff which I realy recommand.

The offline power unit (or whatever you call that) gives me 13 min to turn off my computer normaly incase of power outage (which happens sometimes here).

I'm not sure if my computer feels good with it thought since I notice some boot failures (freezing at the middle of autoexec.bat) but I can't say the boot where the boot failure come from yet. I'll see later.

Edited by Fredledingue
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Congratulations! What version of Paint Shop Pro did the Zoomcam come with?

I've found a few cheap peripherals over the years myself. Among them:

* A Creative Video Blaster WebCam II camera (which I haven't gotten as much use out of as...)

* A Visioneer PaperPort 6000B scanner (which is a bit slow, but was a great buy nonetheless for $5)

* An Iomega Buz video-capture device (One of these days, I ought to get around to finding proper drivers for its built-in SCSI card...)

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Well, I do have a few toys, as well. But the one I do like the most is an Okano Edition 486 DX 33 computer case able to accept ATX motherboards.

I did a quite a few improvements to make it work, but the result is interesting:

- Dimensions: height 68cm, width 22cm, depth 45cm

- Modified ATX PSU. If the ATX MB goes off the devices connected to the computer case (monitor, scanner,...) are powered down, as well.

- The front main power switch can cut off the power to the computer and all devices connected through it. There is additional ATX power switch available, as well (converted from reset switch).

- The Turbo switch was converted to power on/off additional front fan.

- The case had 6x 5.25" bays. I've converted two of them to accept 3x 3.5" devices.

- The led display is 3 digits long. It's a bit strange to fit such a display in 33Mhz computer, but it's perfect for displaying something like "1G8", now.

Anyways, it's the most powerfull 486 case I saw, so far. And, I made no additional hole, in it.

Edited by Sfor
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