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Does anyone know where I can Find restore CD images for my late 90's P3 Dell Latitude CPX-J laptop?

hunterjwizzard said:
I had some fun with that in my desktop support days. Irony of iron is I still miss the work. Just not the people.
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I only missed it back in the 90's when you were titled "computer technician" and you had full reign to do whatever was in your power to solve problems (no adhering to bullshit corporate policy, no sticking to "scope of work" no "Approved software/hardware") FIX EVERYTHING, LEARN EVERYTHING, ADMINISTRATE EVERYTHING....Thats what I miss.


And dealing with Corporate folks is much much more ideal than the general public. Except for the FDIC. Government slobs are the absolute worst miserable types out there.
 
So I have begun restoring this laptop. The last CMos battery I installed is still holding the settings so thats good. I have a pata SSD 16gb drive as the primary. I formatted it fat 32 and installed windows 98 SE. Im trying to load all the drivers from the resource CD (its not a restore cd so might as well use the correct wording). But not matter what I do I cant get the the ess maestro sound card to install. What am I doing wrong?! I have a vague memory of this being a whole thing....
 
Are you sure it isn’t for the CPx-H? I’m assuming you are but it doesn’t hurt to check. Dell has all the drivers on their website still anyway, so if you don’t end up getting the CD to work then I’d try that instead. I wish I could help more with the CD, but I’ve only used one of those ResourceCDs once or twice before and it was years ago. I don’t remember any problems though.
 
Alright then, it should be the right disc. I’d just go see if the exe I linked earlier works then. I don’t own a CPx so I can’t test the driver from that CD on my system.
 
The programs install but dont change the item in device manager. IF I force a driver install manually it just gives a yellow flag.
 
Any specific error from device manager or just the general “this device isn’t working properly” one?
Sounds like it’s the incorrect driver for the system, somehow. This is with both the EXE I linked and the CD?
Is the sound card on in the BIOS and do the BIOS parameters for IRQ, etc. matching with what’s in device manager? Or is this one new enough that that doesn’t matter?
 
Ok. Some photos. dont know why they look so bad, guess it was too dark in my office. Oh well you will see what you need to see.
IMG_20240212_185546.pngIMG_20240212_185610.pngIMG_20240212_185623.pngIMG_20240212_185637.pngIMG_20240212_190402.png
 
Driver appears to not be for the Maestro 2E, at least, it doesn’t say 2E anywhere. Not sure whether that’s the problem, but your CPx is doing something weird - why is the CPU speed reporting as 0MHz in the BIOS? That’s not normal.
 
Because its a newer cpu than the bios can interpret. Its a 650mhz or 700mhz.. from the original 500mhz. I upgraded it like 15 years ago. 550mhz was the reported max
 
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Ah, understood.
Apologies if you’ve answered this, but have you tried the EXE from dell’s website that I linked above? I’m still thinking it’s possible that the CD may have had an incorrect driver on it, or has some other problem. It’s worth ruling out either way.
 
I dont remember the speed but when i take.it apart soon to clean ill look what cpu.

And i tried the cd and that exe.. same thing
 
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I have trully forgotten how unstable and crash prone windows 9x was. I mean I have memories of formatting and reloading constantly but experiencing again.. Why didnt I just run DOS?!
 
So I have no more pcmcia ethernet cards and I am trying to see if any of my wireless cards supports WPa2.... Anyway I have a half dozen of these Cisco Aironet 802.11a/b/g Wireless LAN Client Adapters (CB21AG) from work which I know for a fact SUPPORT WPA2 but have no windows 9X drivers. Id be willing to trade a couple of them for a working pcmcia ethernet card that works in windows 9X.
AIR-CB21AG-A-K9-B2-lg__34092.1636013005.jpg
 
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I'm not sure there is a card with WPA2 support in Windows 98. Orinoco Gold is the "gold standard" as far as I've heard but I don't know whether it works in 98 with WPA2.
 
3lectr1c said:
I'm not sure there is a card with WPA2 support in Windows 98. Orinoco Gold is the "gold standard" as far as I've heard but I don't know whether it works in 98 with WPA2.
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There are but they are few and far between (netgear wg511 v2 for instance - mine must have a bad radio as it drops the connection after a few minutes then cant connect again unless it cools down.. into the trash it went). Regardless I know this. Thats why I am asking to trade for some pcmcia ethernet cards. Which do work in windows 9x
 
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