Gateway Solo 2150 - 2/20/2025

I was at my grandparents house when i found this Gateway Solo 2150. It had pretty decent specs, with a 450Mhz Pentium III and 288MB of ram (So much memories). I had the windows 98 install disc as while as the restoration CD, which turned out to be really lucky. The laptop booted perfectly and recognized the hardware in BIOS. When using these old computer, you must make sure to always remvoe or replace the CMOS battery. While some are better than others, they can often leak, causing damage to the motherboard and making the device useless.

Windows Install

After inserting the install cd, everything seemed to go well until trying to format the hard drive. It would give an unknown error and drop into DOS. When I tried to run the setup program, it would say that the disk was full. This was becuase windows setup could only recognize the disk after it was allocated with fdisk. So I ran fdisk and allocated the full disk as an active dos partition. Then I navigated to the D:\win98\ directory and ran the command "format C:".

This allowed windows 98 to install, in beautiful 16 color graphics and without any sound. This is where I got very lucky. By some miracle, my aunt had kept the restoration CD, and I was able to insert it and install all the drivers. I had sound, and 256 colors! It was amazing.

I havent done much else yet but Windows XP did install (without sound), and the computer runs pretty well!