Category: vintage computing

The 2008 Acer Aspire One…

Acer Aspire OneI’ve been wanting to grab one of these for a while and finally did. Ended up scoring a super clean, un-abused one just like I had back when these were all the rage. Mine came with Win XP, and IIRC had a SATA hard drive and 1 GB RAM. This one was actually a Linux machine from the get-go, neat! Only two things to note, it only has 512 MB RAM… and (according to DMESG anyway) has a PATA SSD… 8 whopping gigabytes. The 8 gig part I don’t mind, but I just expected it’d be SATA and I could easily throw something in… Oh well. Truth be told, 8 GB is enough. Right now I have Debian 12 /w Xorg + i3 and plenty of things installed and I think I’m still under 2GB used on disk. How does it run? Surprisingly well, considering it has 512MB RAM and a 1.6 GHz single core, 32 bit CPU. (HT, but not a real dual core)

$29.99 shipped is all I paid. Worth it for the nostalgia, plus I just wanted a linux machine I can run in the palm of my hand. It may struggle on the modern web, but it is excellent to just pick up and SSH into servers with. Does OK with Falkon on lighter sites too.

You can even still get batteries for these! $18 shipped got me a brand new one, and it is shockingly good for the money. Seems to give a couple hours of runtime.

VMware Workstation Continues to Impress

Yesterday I was quite surprised just how painlessly I was able to get a snappy, usable XP VM up and running in VMware Workstation.

To be clear, running XP in a VM is nothing special nor is it hard to do. But having decent graphics acceleration and device drivers is another story! I’m a true believer in the FOSS philosophy, but so long as there aren’t ads or nag screens I don’t mind using proprietary software so long as it works well.

Just for fun, I thought I’d see how VMware Workstation handles Windows 98 SE. I was surprised indeed.

Display properties, with high resolutions and color depths available

Unreal Tournament Demo v348 seemed a good test, at only 49MB. VMware set this machine up with the venerable AMD PCNET card, so 98SE found it during setup and I didn’t have to do anything — it just worked. I did need to install an old version of the guest tools; I found that on archive.org and have uploaded it to my own server aswell. Will link below.

UTDemo
UT99 drawing > 200 FPS with the software renderer

The game didn’t find a 3D accelerator, or offer DirectX / OpenGL but you could probably get that working. Nearly 250 FPS with software rendering isn’t too bad though!

I’m not interested in the VMware solution for games though, but rather old desktop applications that don’t run stably under wine. For those curious, Unreal Tournament runs PERFECTLY under wine! So that’s definitely how I’d recommend playing it. I just wanted to see how well VMware Workstation worked for something a little more demanding than MS Office. And yeah, its solid!

VMware Tools ISO for 9x / NT/ 2k / XP:
https://archive.org/details/winPreVista

EDIT 04/13/25: I didn’t realize this initially, but the tools did not install an audio driver. VMWare emulates Ensoniq AudioPCI hardware for the 9x guest; amazingly creative still hosts the driver on their site.

Creative/Ensoniq Audio Driver:
https://support.creative.com/downloads/download.aspx?nDownloadId=259

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