The Libretto Saga

[SPX]

I recently purchased a Toshiba Libretto 100CT (P166, 64 MB RAM, 2 GB HDD) off of eBay and figured I'd share the story of some of what I've been through already as well as mention some of the problems I've run into along the way . . . perhaps you guys can help.

First, my motivation. When I was 15 years old I saw an ad in a magazine for the Libretto. This was '98. For those who have never heard of it, it was one of the first--if not THE first--fully functional UMPC. At about the size of a VHS tape, it truly is tiny and, when it was first released, I also thought it was absolutely fascinating. Now, 10 years later, it seems I can afford one, and I happily picked up a 100CT on eBay for $100.

One thing to understand right off is that the Libretto doesn't have a CD-ROM drive and the guy who sold me his apparently never decided to buy an external drive. It does, however, come with a PCMCIA floppy drive which it is capable of booting from. I knew that this would pose a problem as there was no way I was going to use the installation of the OS that was previously installed . . . I was definitely going to reinstall.

My intial inclination was to go with Win95 OSR2 and, after a very long and laborious process, I had copied the contents of the Win95 folder to 29 floppy disks and had installed the OS on the Libby. Windows 95! Man, hadn't seen that in YEARS. It was fast as hell and only took up 120 MB on my tiny HDD. Unfortunately, there were problems. Virtually no software makers support it anymore, it would not run my wireless adapter, and after about half a day's use I was already getting errors about missing DLLs. It didn't take long for me to make the decision to move to Win98 SE.

Unfortunately, the CAB files in 98 are too big, even for specially formatted 1.7MB floppies. So what I ended up doing was copying the Win98 folder over to the C drive via a painfully slow 115Kbps infrared link from my primary laptop, then went in with a boot disk, deleted every single file other than the Win98 folder, and installed Win98 from scratch. Now I'm living in Win98 land. It's very interesting . . . very nostalgic. I haven't used it in years. So far I've taken my little P166 and gotten it on the Internet, networked it to my laptop, played music, played movies (it choked on DIVX but VCD/MPEG1 files run well), and played a few games (though for some reason The 7th Guest errors out after playing it for a few minutes).

I am still attempting to resolve certain problems (for which I intend to make other threads) but so far this has been a pleasant trip down Nostalgia Lane.