Question End of life for my PIII

Apr 12, 2023
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Back around Nov of 2003 I build myself a Athlon XP 3000+ 2.1GHZ Barton system for windows XP . This Motherboard came with windows 98 drivers so about a year after I built it I installed win 98SE on a spare 20GB HHD and I remember it being wicked fast. I didn’t keep win98 because to make it work I had to down grade the Ram from 3GB to 512 MB This was too much of a hassle so I just used the as a win XP system. Besides, I had a great PIII 1GHZ system built on an Asus CUSL2 motherboard that ran win 98SE nicely.
The Athlon XP system died by 2008 but the PIII survived until now. The CUSL2 MB died after a nice 23 year run, and yes I’ve tested the power supply and the CPU all of it is fine except the MB. I really want to still have a working win 98SE system so I figured I could try one of 3 things.
  • Buy a used ASUS CUSL2 on Ebay. This strategy would allow me to plug every component back in and the hard drive will just boot to win 98 like nothing ever happened. Not only would this be easy but preserving my drive which is 120GB dual boot to Win 2000/98SE would be awesome. It also had a 60GB drive with win ME that worked perfectly. In fact ME ran best on that system. (Surprised?) All three OS’s (98SE, 2000, ME) were installed back in 2004 when updates were readily available. Easiest most cost effective but 20 year old HDD’s are a ticking time bomb.
  • Buy a used Asus TUSL2 on ebay. The TUSL2 uses the same chips set (815E) as the CUSL2 but uses the PIII tualatin. So I believe this will also save me the trouble of reformatting and reinstalling with the bonus of a faster CPU . Up to 1.33GHZ. But, will it work well with reinstalling? And, would I even notice a difference in performance between a Coppermine and Tualatin CPU? If the answer is yes to both questions then this would be a no brainer.
  • Upgrade to Athlon XP Motherboard. If I go this route I already know that I will see an appreciable difference in performance. I also still have all the drivers for the graphic card, sound card and, Ethernet card. The down side is a complete reinstall and I may not be able to reinstall those old Windows to the complete splendor they were. I can’t get all the updates anymore. I have many windows updates saved to disk and I know how to get several more but not all . I do realize that 20 year old hard drives are a ticking time bomb so it behooves me to buy a new drive anyway.
So what would you folks do? Would you have any other suggestions?
 
Apr 12, 2023
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Good question . The last cool thing I did was to transfer VHS on to this PC and burn it on DVD. The video card came with a S video input. Also creative lab live drive I installed came with RCA input which have been ideal for digitizing analog music. Older dos games can also be fun. Of course now days it's rare for me to digitize old analog since music and movies are easily downloadable.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
Good question . The last cool thing I did was to transfer VHS on to this PC and burn it on DVD. The video card came with a S video input. Also creative lab live drive I installed came with RCA input which have been ideal for digitizing analog music. Older dos games can also be fun. Of course now days it's rare for me to digitize old analog since music and movies are easily downloadable.
A $12 capture device like this will do that:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08P1RP4JF
 
Apr 12, 2023
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Option number 4 ( the forget about it option) is not an option. So if I'm going to revive an authentic windows 98 System I guess I'll make it the ultimate. Obviously It's not really going to be usable, like duh. I'm going to grab an athlon XP Barton or athlon 64. Since 1997 I've built 6 rigs for myself and I've attempted to keep them going for as long as possible. So now I've got 4 out of 6 working. A pentiumMMX, a core 2 duo, an i7 1st gen, and i7 10th gen. There is s lot of research and money going into it so I'll keep them going for a while.
 
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