Tag Archives: McAfee

HP Pavilion 6630

An early 2000s desktop PC running Windows 98SE, designed as a basic desktop PC for simple web browsing as evidenced with its included software which is geared to the casual home user.

The Pavilion is HP’s brand of conventional desktop PCs tailored to the home market, similar to IBM’s Aptiva and the Dell Dimension line.

According to an archive CNET page, it has a Celeron 500MHz processor with 64MB of memory and a 10.2GB hard drive. For 86Box I used a smaller 4GB hard drive and a slower processor to ease on the emulation. Variations of this model exist with different optical drives, hard drives and processor combinations with some coming with AMD K6 processors and CD-R drives.

Engadget

Starting the recovery process, which just inflates the OS files from a previous install. There is no instillation wizard, HP just took an install and made a restore image out of it. This does mean a lot of New Hardware dialog boxes will appear due to this, and I had originally intended to use it on a HP Brio motherboard in 86Box, but had great difficulty with resource conflicts and BSoD’s. The Virtual PC profile/motherboard worked much better instead.

With the old VM it even thought the floppy drive controller was a tape drive.

Post Restore

We are booted into a wizard that asks us to confirm the licence agreement, set the keyboard layout, confirm our region and our OEM product key. After a reboot, another wizard starts:

Before we get to the desktop, we are invited to complete the registration wizard where we enter our name, address and our product key which would have been provided in a separate booklet.

And then after that we are given a tour of the operating system, as some users may have been upgrading from a Windows 95 system, or might even be their first PC. This goes around the basic elements of Windows 98 and gives an animated demonstration of navigating Windows Explorer. This also complement’s the built in Windows tutorials for Microsoft.

Desktop

The Windows desktop with some of HP’s customisations. You will notice the HP Internet Manager, which provides easy access to various internet sites and are sorted by categories affirming that this computer was designed for the consumer that wants to browse the internet.

Clicking on any of the links (Such as Shopping) will open Internet Explorer with a customised link to that page. It sort of works in a similar manor to the internet channels included with Windows 98 and is HP’s replacement for the channel bar. Also, when you click on a link, large green text appears to the bottom left of the screen showing which button you clicked. I think this is supposed to replicate the OSD of many TV’s of the 90s where volume would be displayed in that style of display.

Sadly most of these links are long since dead, and the wayback machine does not hold any archived copies, possibly because they were not designed to be indexed. All of them lead to a paviliondownload.com domain.

Whilst we have Internet Explorer open, we can see the Yahoo! Toolbar that was preinstalled. Yahoo was popular at the time and was the common homepage for many users, similar services were AOL, Lycos and AOL. As for Internet Explorer, version 5.00.2614.3500 is installed.

HP have also bundled a few favourites (Bookmarks) of their own with links to their corporate and dedicated Pavilion homepage.

Also another look at the green OSD, it appears when you adjust the volume too. You can actually customise this in the HP keyboard utility. Changes that can be made include the duration of the message, colour and font size.

Themes and Customisation

We can see HP have included a customised desktop wallpaper, in fact there are four of them provided in different colours (Purple, Green & Blue) and HPStndrd which is a lighter version of blue.

HP also added three custom colour schemes that can be selected in the appearance tab, again the choices being Blue/Green and Purple

Also a shot of the system properties box, with the OEM logo and support information.

Bundled Applications & Utilities

Microsoft Encarta 2000 – Preinstalled but requires the Encarta 2000 disc in order to do anything.

Microsoft Money – Finance management software, the 2000 edition is used here.

Microsoft Works – basic productivity suite that includes a word processor, organiser and a spreadsheet application.

Trellix – Some sort of website builder that included a few templates that allowed for users to create and build their own website. I wonder if they will work with WordPress?

Quicken – Basic 2000 comes preinstalled and is a personal finance management utility, similar to Microsoft Money which was also included. I guess here you’re supposed to populate this with you bank statements and recent purchase’s, so you can get a rough idea of your balance history.

There’s a few online services included within the Online Services folder – AOL, AT&T WorldNET, Disney’s Club Blast, EarthLink, GTE Easy Sign Up, MindSpring, Prodigy internet and Compuserve.

Also, a Games and Entertainment category in the Start menu. Here you can find links to RealPlayer G2 and MusicMatch JukeBox which was a popular MP3 music player, along with a link to Emusic.com. There are also shortcuts to Windows games like Solitaire.

There is a My Yahoo program in the Start Menu, clicking on that takes you to an internet connection wizard that is HP branded. Since we are connecting via LAN, we can breeze past this. Dialup internet was a very common way of accessing the internet and would have been the de facto way of getting online, but was also around the era where cable and DSL broadband internet was starting to become mainstream.

HP Help: Help and support centre for novice users. This can give information about your HP system and comes with a link to the user manual. This does require a separate CD that has this contained, it is not saved on the hard disk.

FAX (QuickLink III) Fax application, if you cannot use the built in Windows fax utility.

Lastly we also have McAfee security suite which can be found in the system tools folder. This includes the anti-virus and the V-Shield that acts as a firewall. A necessity as Windows did not come with any virus protection at all, that was left up to the end user or the system builder and may would bundle either McAfee or Norton Security.

The typical Windows 98 experience

Additional Links

Recovery Image – Archive.org – This version is cracked which allows for it to be installed on any PC or virtual environment and is an alternative to a regular install. There are two versions with the November 1999 being linked, an August 1999 version exists but has not been tested, perhaps that’s regular Windows 98FE?

Dell Dimension 1100

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A low-end desktop system released by Dell in 2005, paired with a Pentium 4 and 512MB of RAM with onboard Intel graphics. Typically paired with a 15inch LCD monitor. Nothing really special about the system and there’s a distinct lack of Microsoft Works unless it was included in a separate CD.

Typical Dell desktop background of the era. I remember this was used on the Inspiron 9100 also. Notice the AOL being branded as LOL, not sure if that occurred on the actual system or something that got renamed

Software

Let’s look at the software bundled

McAfee

Dell and McAfee are commonly seen together, and this system was no exception to that. Like Norton, this acts as both the antivirus and the firewall for the system.

McAfee firewall will pop up if a new program tried to connect to the internet or access a network resource.

Dell Support

A utility that pops up whilst your in the middle of a SimCity/Civ session and causes the game to minimize itself, only for Dell Support to prompt you about a rip off offer, then when you try to restore the game it freezes and you have to kill it in task manager and you lose all your unsaved data.

In all fairness its useful for first time computer buyers, bot the occasional popups will get annoying after a while. There is an option to reduce or turn off the alerts.

Google Desktop

A software application that allowed you to search Google from your desktop, and included an indexed desktop search client. This also placed a search box on your taskbar of which will bring results from both the web and files/folders that are local to the PC. This would give a similar experience to the Windows Search feature that was introduced in Windows Vista, although Microsoft would also release Windows Search for Windows XP.

A sidebar included widget-like functionality, similar to Mac OS X Tiger that was released at the time. As its a Google produced, expect it to data mine the hell out of you, I’m sure most people took the time to read the privacy policy.

Core Photo Album 6

Photo management application. This is designed to gather can collect images from an external source, such as a digital camera or an external SD card.

You can edit and apply different effects like sepia, or add a digital frame if you wish, and then export and save or print to a photo printer. Different effects include red-eye removal, which was common on a digital cameras of the time. Alternatives included Microsoft PictureIt, Adobe Photoshop Elements,

This copy was part of a trial, and expires after 60 days of use.

QuickBooks

Some sort of accounting software is designed for small businesses like a high street shops. It makes several mentions of creating business so I’d say it’s for a commercial environment in comparison to Microsoft Money which is more for home/personal use.

This appears to be a full back-office management system since it allows for you to create customer accounts, useful for booking appointments. In this was in functions similar to Microsoft Access

MyDVD LE

I assume this is intended to create DVD discs and backups, but will not function since this technically isn’t a Dell machine.

Musicmatch JUKEBOX

A popular music player and an online digital music store, that was mostly backed by Yahoo. Here you could purchase music to transfer to a supported music player. Alternatively, it can function as a standalone music player, as an alternative to Windows Media Player. MusicMatch was later discontinued in 2006.

AOL

The 9.0 desktop client comes included along with a free internet trial

Sonic CINEPlayer

A DVD player of some sort. However, this will not function in a VM and will inform that its intended for only Dell computers. The full screen interface appears very similar to Windows Media Center.

Roxio Creator LE

CD burning and authoring program that supports the use of burning audio CD’s and can burn ISO disk images.

Gateway Tigereye (86Box)

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Another OEM system, but this seems to be a motherboard that was used in multiple Gateway systems from around 1997.

Motherboard appears to be based on an Intel design, might be a clone of an Intel board but with a Gateway customized BIOS. This was possibly used in various different models used throughout the late Pentium era. I actually had a Gateway system that was in a similar time frame, but we had it second hand and the original owner had wiped it in favor of a fresh Windows 98 install.

Supports up to 128MB RAM
Supports CD-ROM booting
No sign of USB, 86Box cannot interface with USB currently

Install/Recovery CD

You will get the option to format as FAT32 or FAt16, whichever one you choose will depend on what build of Windows 95 you have, this restore Cd does not feature a Windows 95 install, instead it contains a set of drivers and utilities that are installed in conjunction to Windows 95, but you must use your own Windows install disk instead.
FAT32 is supported on OSR2.1 onwards, whilst earlier builds use FAt16, if in doubt choose FAT16. I believe you can ‘Upgrade’ to FAT32 once you update the OS.

One potential issue here was the IDE CD-ROM driver, the restore CD gives you the option to choose, possibly because some systems might have used a propriety CD-ROM interface, or might be using the IDE interface on the soundcard instead. This could potentially cause issues if you choose the wrong option. For this I chose the Generic IDE-ROM driver, which can be found all the way at the bottom.

Once you begin the restore process you are requested to insert the Windows 95 install Cd and reboot, of which the system will begin to copy the Windows 95 files.

From here setup runs like a typical Windows 95 retail install, however on mine I encountered an error with the OEM serial number, and had to manually enter another one. I’m not sure of eyes are specific to the OEM version they were bundled with, or if each manufacture uses a slightly different algorithm, or maybe something failed to validate in the background.

Reboot, then Gateway software proceeds to install

Installs keyboard multimedia utility, then install utility freezes. I had to force a reboot at this point

A quick reboot and it then installs McAfee Anti-Virus

Installs DirectX 5, reboots again. Kind of redundant since OSR2 already included DirectX 5

Installs Microsoft Intellipoint, Gateway possibly bundled the Microsoft mouse with their systems

Lastly the sound card software install, Windows had already detected the SoundBlaster on install, but here it inclused the Creative sound software.

Post Install

Megaphone

Appears to be a modem and address book software to manage internet connections and user contact information.

AudioStation2

A MIDI and CD player with a Hi-Fi like interface, something similar was also installed on the Sony VAIO PCV-90

Adding a second drive

The motherboard has two IDE channels for a total of four IDE drive, with the SoundBlaster 16 PnP card we can also add an extra two for a total of six IDE devices.

Adding the second IDE drive, I encountered a problem since after adding it as IDE slave (0:1), Windows 95 would freeze upon bootup. The way to fix it was to use the Windows 95 bootdisk, use the FDISK /FPRMT command to initialize the salve drive, format as FAT32 (Or FAT16 if you are using an earlier version of Windows 95), then reboot and format within the boot disk.
After then would Windows 95 boot up and mount the drive.

Preinstalled Software

This was a bit dry, I presume Gateway didn’t bundle much with their systems or this is typically stored on another disk. From browsing the CD-ROM it’s a generic recovery disk with a range of drivers that covered the hardware that gateway would have shipped in their desktops. Any additional bundled software would have been shipped on a separate disk.

Even the OEM branding was scarce, I expected there to be a cow-skin themed wallpaper like the cardboard boxes used

Adding additional devices

PCI: Video Card (S3 Trio64)
PCI: 3D Accelerator (3DFX Voodoo)
PCI: For future use
PCI: For future use
ISA: Ethernet (AMD PCnet-ISA)
ISA: For future use
ISA: Soundcard (SoundBlaster 16 PnP)

PCI slots are based on the amount found on the Vogons wiki, there are four PCI slots in total but there may be many more as this board could optionally come with onboard video (This could be AGP?) Or sound.
Some versions of the board came with an onboard S3 Trio64, the Phoenix in 86box was the closest match and as a bonus was automatically detected and installed during instillation.

Device Manager with some duplicate devices

Useful Links

Restore Image – Archive

Windows 95 OSR2.5 (2.1 might be a better fit, or the original Windows 95, make sure to choose the FAT16 option when formatting for pre-OSR2.1 Windows 95)

Motherboard Information – VOGONS – Not a 1:1 match but the Gateway might be a close match to it

eMachines T2200

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Product Information

The Bliss wallpaper, with a touch of eMachines

We all know eMachines, and have probably used an eMachines system at one point in our lives, known for being very affordable (Cheap) computer systems for first time buyers or for people who just need a basic system. Typically found at PCWorld or Currys, These computers are typically paired with either an Intel Celeron or an AMD Durion or Athlon.

Install

eMachines made use of Norton Ghost to operate the recovery media, this initially presented us with a Windows 9x style boot menu which gave us the option to boot into the recovery environment.

Ran into a few issues getting this one up and running. Whilst the initial restore process went through without a hitch, I was greeted with a BSOD upon bootup

Following the guidance on the archive link, I booted into Hirens and ran a script that reset the hard disk driver, which was causing the BSOD.

When the command windows open’s, choose option T first to set the target root, this is the Windows install directory (C:\WINDOWS). Just check that Hirens actually mounted it to C as it may have assigned the hard drive to another letter.

Programs > Registry > Fix Hard Disk Controller

Programs are located in the Hirens Program launcher, Not the start menu

Alternatively, navigate to the CD-ROM root and go to HBCD\Programs\FixHDC.bat to launch the program

After a reboot, we were able to boot into Windows and progress through the OOBE section, which has some eMachines customizations.

OEMLink

The start menu here has an OEM link which I’ve rarely seen on Windows XP systems. This is an option that can be selected in the Windows XP start menu that takes you to online OEM information.

Realtek AvRack

Some sort of bundled media player that makes of the sound cards processing functions, none of these are functional under a virtual machine since it emulates a different soundcard. I was able to play a regular MP3 file but none of the effects would work. These would have included echo and voice pitch changing effects

AIM AOL Instant Messenger

Another popular instant messaging application, this was supposedly popular in the US, but didn’t take off in the UK where MSN was more popular.

ICQ

ICQ was a popular instant messaging program before the likes of AIM and MSN Messanger took over. Each user would have a unique ICQ number. I personally never used it myself since it was already obsolete when I first heard of it (2004) and barely anyone I knew had an ICQ account.

McAfee

Bundled antivirus software, this also comes with a firewall bundled. Sadly this version can no longer be updated and we are stuck with virus definitions from 2002.

Although once you enable the firewall, be prepared for endless connection alerts whenever you open a program or even do anything that uses its own socket.

Winamp

A popular media player bundled with this system. A little redundant with Windows Media Player, unless Winamp is capable of playing a file that WMP cannot.

Microsoft Works

Microsoft’s entry-level productivity suite that provided a word processor, spreadsheet software, and a basic database. To make the program more user-friendly to use, a a task launcher is used to open various elements of the application since this is designed to appeal to users who are not familiar with office productivity software. Here a user can select from a list of tasks they wish to complete, and Works will open the correct template for them.

Some of these are very specific like coaching a sports team or planning a family reunion. Some of these are quite useful, there’s a template to create a fitness log using a spreadsheet that helps keep track of your workouts, or if you want to keep track of road trips.

Microsoft Money

Money 2003 – used to organize your finances and bank accounts, back in the early days of internet banking. Nowadays most banks offer something similar online.

Cyberlink PowerDVD

PowerDVD is software intended to allow DVD video to be played, it was commonly bundled with PCs that came bundled with a DVD drive. Although I’m sure Windows Media Player is capable of doing the same thing so this software would be redundant?

BigFix

Appears to be a utility that monitors your PC’s performance, and is preinstalled from the CD. There are also links to eMachines technical support. In normal operation, it will notify you if a software update or patch is available and will prompt you to install it (It does not install automatically). Although if Windows Update is enabled then this kind of redundant, possibly that would have checked for driver updates also?

BigFix was later acquired by IBM and was renamed IBM Bigfix.

RealPlayer

Realplayer was a popular way to stream video over the internet since it was cross-platform, supporting both Windows and Macintosh.

Compuserve

Another internet service provider provided its own software to access its services.