As a partial followup to my last ThinkPad post, here’s Chromium 34 (from 2014) running on Windows 2000.

It’s not the most ideal for daily use as it’s quite buggy, but it astonishingly does work. If you want to grab a copy, go to this place here run by a nice fellow. No installer, just a zip.

If you don’t have KernelEx on your install, I have that stuff hosted on w2krepo; you’ll want usp51.zip and Windows2000-UURollup-v11-d20141130-x86-ENU (Extended Kernel).7z. I’d suggest to get them installed in that order, as UURollup messed IE stuff up for me before I did install the latter. They’re both very useful updates/patches to have, and the same sdfox7.com site has plenty of software that wouldn’t run on 2000 otherwise, such as Flash 29 (which, unfortunately, I haven’t gotten working as of yet) and a portable version of Firefox 48 (one I have not yet tried).

I have had this T41 running Windows 2000 for a while, but for the longest time I had a problem with the drivers for its internal Intel wireless chip. Its configuration embedded right into the Network Adapter properties window, which was neat, but there was no way to save profiles and more importantly, it only supported WEP encryption. And you’d know that wouldn’t fly today.

The annoying bit is that I had used AntiX and MX Linux on the laptop during its past life, and wireless (and WPA2) worked perfectly, albeit with some issues with range. It’s possible that had I used XP on it, WPA2 would have worked there too since there’s a native wireless stack. Unfortunately for me though, an updated Windows 2000 driver was nowhere to be found.

That brings us to probably the best $10 (or 10000 Microsoft Rewards points if you want to be specific about it, or 6.02214076×10²³ Neopoints adjusted for inflation, not including $0.74 sales tax) I had ever spent. And, as it turns out, it even came early instead of the Feb. 24-March timeframe I had expected.

And surprisingly enough, it came new in box, installation CDs and all:

Installation was fairly simple. I worried a little when I noticed the Standalone Driver CD was meant for XP/Vista (versions of Windows that did ship with a wireless stack), but the Resource CD fortunately did have the software that’d run on 2000 SP4.

Connecting to my home network with the software seemed to be a little problematic at first, with it saying Connected to Router and not having obtained an IP address or found the default gateway, but connecting to my Time Capsule worked out fine. I’ve checked again and it seems that was just a temporary issue, now works fine. And with that, here it is:

I’ve always liked the PC Card form factor, whether it be the original PCMCIA standard, CardBus or the newer ExpressCard. All those sleeker, slimmer, modern laptops tend to forgo this type of expandability for the promise that USB-C will eventually solve everything and that dongles are the answer. As for that, I’ll always prefer the T41.

I got hooked up with a box copy of FL Studio 10, which remarkably installed on the ThinkPad with no issues. I was a little concerned it wouldn’t run, as the system requirements stated XP or Vista and not 2000, but it installed anyway. I haven’t been able to make out whether it runs any worse than 7 on the Pentium M processor (the requirements stated a Pentium 4 or greater), but it appears to be working well.

What that means is that you could expect more demos coming from me in the future. The FL Studio 7 trial version didn’t support any project saving, which means should I come back to the demos I’ve posted previously, I’d need to reconstruct it from MIDI. Which isn’t impossible, just tricky to get the same sound, as knobs and plugin settings weren’t exported.

But anything I try out going forward is definitely gonna get saved, meaning I’ll be able to work on it after the initial export.

So, does that mean dcb slapcore soon? Maybe. >:3c

[6:05 PM]  lince euroasiático: quick gimmie a dumb name for a 140bpm track
[6:06 PM]  lince euroasiático: this thingy's untitled :pensiverat:
[6:06 PM]  Cammy: James Blunt is True Speedcore
[6:06 PM]  lince euroasiático: on it

Another playaround with FL Studio 7. Actually quite like how this take turned out. (Note that the percussion was somewhat shoehorned in, apologies.)

Just played around with SimSynth and delay. Recorded two channels live for 3:17 with (I believe) 1/4 step quantization. For it being me stumbling around on musical typing for a few minutes, it almost sounds like music, which is pretty wack.

And as a warmup just for funsies I did:

Speaking of which, you really should follow the mtlx search and its very deep lore. Just gotta wonder.