A first time look at a Sharp OEM install. Sharp was a manufacturer of compact laptops that were popular in Japan, but also made a few for the western market. They did have some sort of a retail presence in the UK as you could find their laptops in stores like Curry’s, but they were always sub-notebooks. Like Fujitsu and NEC, Sharp also made computers for the 8/16bit home computer market in Japan.
The recovery utility which seems to want us to split the disk into two partitions. This was common across some OEM’s with the belief that storing user data on the second partition would help with fragmentation whilst leaving the operating system and program files on the main partition. Though your document folder would still be mapped to the main partition also.
Going through the OOBE, theres no logo in the top right corner as we’ve seen with other OEM installs
The desktop, with a custom wallpaper. Resolution is a little but understandable considering this is a netbook class of computer
Windows Help & Support with a touch of Sharp
Network Setup Utility, each icon represents a network settings or profile. It looks a little blank as it was intended for use with the notebooks internal WiFi card.
Here is what it’s supposed to look like. The different icons represent the types of network you can connect to and the profiles can represent the different sharing settings. This isn’t too different to what modern Windows does when it asks you to set either a Home, Work or Public connection which affect the file sharing ability, since you might not want to enable Public file sharing when you’re connected to a public hotspot
Drag’n Drop CD+DVD – disc burning application. This places a sidebar to the bottom right of the screen where you can drag files to be copied to a CD.
This appears to have been developed by Sonic Solutions who also went to develop RecordNow! Seen on other OEM installs.
Here you can rip an audio CD, or burn existing files to disc. It a bit clunky to operate and the UI looks like something you would see out of a Hollywood TV, it’s rare to see a program refer to itself as a window.
And Norton Antivirus 2003 comers included
Lastly we have InterVideo WinDVD4 which serves as the default DDVD player. Amazing this worked within the virtual machine so this must provide some sort of software MPEG2 recorder. At least I thought it worked, it decoded the first frame and was then froze on that frame. The audio was still playing however and when I eventually closed, a quick shot of the last frame came up before closing the program.
Recovery Media Download – From Archive.org, This version is unlocked to function on any machine
A look at the Fujitsu LifeBook S6120 Windows install, running in a Parallels Virtual machine. Fujitsu are a well known brand in Japan for Personal Computers and are no stranger in the West either, having enterprise contracts with various corporations and governments for IT solutions. Fujitsu also produced FM Townes Marty range of computers that were popular with the Japanese market and used x86 processors.
Starting the recovery process. At first i thought the graphics were corrupted, probably not a good idea to use this effect for recovery software
We need to reset the HDDcontroller settings in the Windows registry, to do this we need Hiren’s boot cd. Start Mini windows XP and then click on Hiren’s Menu and select Fix HDD controller form the Registry menu. If you’re stuck at this point, refer to the two screens above which will point you in the right direction
Once the console comes up, select option 2 and then enter the install directory of the Windows folder, which will be C:\Windows.
If unsure, Alt Tab out and check in my Computer to see which drive letter its mounted as
When everything is correct, you can reboot into the install
The OOBE with the Fujitsu Logo
And the desktop, with a custom Fujitsu wallpaper. A few others come included that have the Fujitsu infinite logo, which reminds me of that hidden Sonic CD screen (fun is infinite)
Now lets take a look at some of the software
Zinio Reader, appears to be a magazine reader of sorts. Kind of like Adobe Reader but has a few documents on there already which look to be magazines.
Unfortunately whilst I can open them, trying to turn the page causes the VM to freak out and suspend with a graphics error. I’m guessing the program is trying to do something that the virtual GPU does not like. This happens quite friendly and you can see a bunch of blue lines appear when it happens.
Included magazines appear to be from BuisnessWeek, Harvard Business Review, Sporting News and PC Magazine. This service is actually still going, and you can still purchase magazines from there, although this version of the client is long obsolete.
There’s also NewsStand reader, which serves the same purpose
Netscape version 7 comes included, with some Fujitsu branding
Norton AntiVirus 2003 is the security software included here. This only includes the antivirus, not the internet security suite. I couldn’t get this to update unlike the Norton Internet Security that was seen in the VAIO RG620
Veritas RecordNow – I’m sure this was originally made by Sonic (Sonic RecordNow!) or they might have acquired off them. Either way this is the software used to burn CD and DVD’s containing either data or music.
A CD player application comes invoiced that can play audio compact discs. You might think why does this exist when you have Windows Media Player installed but this is a dedicated CD pLayer application and have a very compact interface, ideal if you just want to listen to CD’s without the bloat of Windows Media Player. This only plays from the primary CD player, so connecting a USB CD drive didn’t work at first until I 69’d the drive letters in disk management so that the USB drive was the D:\ drive.
It’s a nice program to listen to music to whilst you work, and you can possibly control the playback via the media keys on the laptop itself.
There is also a security panel application, but this does not load. Instead we are treated to this error message. Chances are its BIOS locked to Fujitsu laptops.
Microsoft Works comes included here which serves as a basic productivity suite. Im surprised this here as this class of laptops would have been used in an office environment where Microsoft Office would have been used instead.
Other software that comes with, but not already installed is Microsoft Reader and Windows Journal Viewer. This can be installed by clicking on the Third Party Software icon on the desktop which opens the folder where the installers are located
A look at the OEM branding in the system properties
Inserting the second CD-ROM starts the easy instillation which is used to install additional software. So far everything appears to be installed already from the recovery image, though this might be used to install supplementary software the retailer might have included as part of a bundle.
If you’re wondering what the Click Me! link in the start menu does, it displays this message and then disappears, along with the shortcut itself. Probably self terminates if it detects it’s not on a legit Fujitsu machine
A similar laptop to the ThinkPad T20, but this appears to be a customized image for a specific University. Lets take a look…
The recovery utility is very similar to what we have seen previously. This will restore the operating system installed to the hard drive, and will initialize it if the drive is blank. Once completed the system will restart.
Currently using 86Box (4.0.1) with the Gigabyte GA-686BX motherboard, which has a similar chipset to the actual notebook itself, Intel 440BX chipset.
After a few New Hardware Dialog boxes, we arrive at the desktop. Here we have Windows 98, compared to Windows 95 that the T20 we look at came with.
Very similar to the T20 we have the IBM custom wallpapers, sound schemes and colour schemes that can be selected. There is also a custom wallpaper from the Carolina Computing Initiative which is the default wallpaper and it appears this is a disto that’s intended to be imaged on ThinkPad laptops for a North Carolina University.
I guess IBM had a facility where institutions could create their own recovery images, complete with their own branding and any additional utilities to allow these images to be distributed to all notebooks that are used within that institution.
Office 2000 looks to be preinstalled for us, this includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Access, along with a sidebar to quickly launch Office. Not the best idea for a laptop with a small resolution screen (640×480) since it takes up valuable screen estate. Thankfully you can disable this.
The Start menu showing preinstalled applications, and one of the custom IBM colour schemes
CCl Laptop Tour: A tutorial application that is built using Macromedia Flash (Now Adobe, now dead). This provides information regarding the laptop itself, and is to help get students accustomed to using their new notebook. Information on installed software is also included. One thing to note is this program is very noisy, with swoosh sound effects for every animated text on the screen. It reminds be of creating PowerPoint presentations using PowerPoint 2003 and littering the slideshow with different animations and sound effects to make it more cool.
Norton AntiVirus 2000
Norton AntiVirus 2000
Norton AntiVirus 2000
Norton AntiVirus 2000 comes with the install, here you can run virus scans (or set a reoccurring schedule), and make system backups to floppy or Zip disk drives if you have one plugged in. Like other Thinkpad’s of the era, this model supports the SmartBay that lets the user swap and install drives whilst the system is active, and Zip drives are supported using this bay.
Norton also included a Liveupdate feature for both program and virus definition updates, but this just crashed the program, and the entire system
ConfigSafeEZ makes a copy of critical system files, kind redundant when you have Norton Rescue installed
IBM ThinkPad A20
IBM ThinkPad A20
A couple of ThinkPad utilities come included:
Battery MaxiMiser – a simple program that informs the user on how to get the most from their battery. The Presentation Director Wizard shows you details on how to connect and enable an external LCD projector or display. You can change the external resolution which will scale the internal display (since it only supports 640×480)
We also have Netscape Navigator 4.7 preinstalled as an alternative to Internet Explorer, showing the default homepage of the era using theoldnet as a proxy server.
WS_FTP
WS_FTP
WS_FTP
WS_FTP appears to be an FTP (File Transfer protocol) program to connect to remote FTP servers, This has already been configured to connect to an Ipswich server, though there are plenty of other servers included by default.
Tried connecting to a few servers (Microsoft, NASA) but no luck
WinAmp 2.5 is also preinstalled to playback MP3’s from Napster
CoSession Remote 32 (v8.1) – A remote control program that lets you control a desktop computer (That also has the supporting software installed) over a network, similar to Remote Desktop or VNC. It will also function over the internet and can be used to transfer files.
Main use for the program would be for Helpdesk support purposes, or if new software needs to be installed remotely. I’ll have to look at this in more detail when I find another copy.
One of the last generation of Thinkpad laptops branded as IBM before Lenovo was introduced. Let’s take a look at what software was included with a typical IBM Thinkpad install.
Desktop after a fresh install, complete with an IBM custom wallpaper and a link to the Access IBM for the OEM Link.
Access IBM
A program that goes through the features of the ThinkPad and allows easy access to common functions that Windows does not typically cover. It also has links to various support topics and articles, acting as an electronic alternative to the bundled documentation.
A shortcut to Access IBM appears in the Windows Help & Support center.
IBM Update Connector
Checks for driver updates and any new versions of bundles software. In a domain environment you can also set up your own IBM update server where approved and tested updates can be distributed, instead of downloading from IBM directly.
Battery MaxiMizer Wizard
Helps monitor the battery health and how to get the best battery life.
ThinkVantage Technologies
Shows off the different features of your ThinkPad like the rescue and recovery software to recover any missing or corrupted files. The active protection system with shuts off the hard drive when a fall is detected, possibly a sensor is embedded into the laptop to allow it to detect this.
SONIC Expresslabeler
Adobe Reader
Appears to be present but not completely installed by default. Opening it for the first time reveals some sort of unarchiver. Also a look at an interactive wallpaper also provided by IBM, which displays a graphical view of the hard drive and its space used, and the calendar which shows the correct date (But not any schedules or reminders). There’s also a section for email, but I have yet to get this to show anything, possibly only works with Outlook Express.
InterVideo WinDVD
DVD playback software for the included DVD drive, this does not function in the virtual machine as it complains about the lack of copy protection. Even Windows Media Player had issues playing a DVD.
InterVideo WinDVD Creator
You can create and burn your own DVD video discs, intended for use for home movies (Through I wonder if DVD-rip torrents could be imported and burnt in this way). here we can create and manipulate the DVD home menu using its own design and navigation. Alternatively, a static slideshow can be created using photos captured from a digital camera.
IBM (Sonic) RecordNow!
A popular CD recording utility I’ve seen bundled on various laptops from this era (Toshiba A60). You can burn a regular ISO image or an audio or MP3 CD. Sonic would later be acquired by Roxio and would be integrated into their products.
Norton Antivirus / Internet Security
Typical virus protection of the year, Norton AntiVirus was bundled with various IBM products. Norton has the ability to scan and detect any virus embedded in email applications, providing you use an email client that Norton supports (Like Microsoft Outlook)
I’m surprised it even allowed a version this old to be activated, I doubt it would perform well against modern malware.
Desktop Themes
Two desktop themes come included, which feature their own sounds, desktop icons and wallpaper. Both will use the Luna silver theme
Wallpaper
Three wallpapers are included, with the second one being a dynamic active desktop wallpaper mentioned earlier.
Screensavers
A few screensavers that show off and advertise the features of the laptop.
Control Panel
Various control panel applets that have been preinstalled by IBM
IBM Active Protection: controls the freefall hard drive protection
ThinkPad Configuration: Supposed to change various options for your Thinkpad
A mid-2003 desktop PC that functions as a media center of sorts, and features dual optical drives (CD burner with a DVD reader) and remote control with an IR receiver. Some models featured an analog TV tuner and a dial-up modem fitted to one of the PCI slots.
VAIO Style
Recovery Wizard
Our VAIO journey starts with the Recovery Wizard, which takes us through the formatting process.
Remarkably it looks like a Windows 2000 environment.
Post Install
The Sony-branded OOBE, which presents the opportunity to register with Sony and Microsoft.
Norton Internet Security comes bundled with the laptop which provides virus protection for a year since it is activated, along with a firewall. Norton also integrates itself into Internet Explorer, providing popup protection. It also appears within Windows Explorer itself.
After the first bootup, we are prompted to insert one of the VAIO recovery disks, these are tied to the machine and will not work inside a virtual environment, and rely on different copy protection
Interesting, Norton seems to be able to pickup and download a few updates, considering this product is nearing 20 years old that’s quite impressive. But I doubt these cover the latest virus definitions, Norton possibly still operates the server that holds these aged definition updates.
There are a few programs missing since the final part of the recovery wizard specifically checks that you are running on a Sony VAIO PC. I wonder if this checks for the exact model, or if there is just the Sony string in the BIOS, would this work for other Sony models?
SonicStage
SonicStage was the software used to manage and playback Sony’s ATARC format audio, which was their own property audio format that was initially used on the first MiniDisc models, and was later used for their Walkman digital music players. ATARC was more efficient than MP2 and MP3 at higher bitrates but compared less with AAC or WMA. ATARC was also only supported on Sony products, and even then not all of their electronics supported it, Sony Ericsson phones in Europe had no support for ATRAC, and neither did the first PlayStation or the PlayStation 2, with the PS3 introducing support for the codec.
SonicStage was very similar to iTunes in concept and acted as a way to play purchased songs from Sony’s CONNECT store. As these files were protected by DRM, an account and correct authorization was required to playback the songs purchased by the user. SonicStage could also sync and transfer songs to supported Walkman players, and only Walkman players.
This was during a dark period of time where record companies insisted that much purchases online had to be digitally protected using some form of DRM, which meant purchasing music from one vendor would mean you could only play that track on software or a device that the vendor had support for. This meant music purchased from iTunes could not be played back on a Walkman or a Microsoft PlaysForSure device without burning it to a CD, then reimporting it as MP3 or whichever format the program and device supported, basically the analog hole.
Was it any wonder people turned to piracy?
DRM free music stores later came about, and many vendors eventually started offering DRM free downloads for their songs and all was well. Then the music industry went one step further and insisted streaming was the next best thing, meaning you no longer owned or had direct access to music, instead of being steamed from the cloud for a monthly fee.
As for Sony, the CONNECT store closed down in 2008, and Sonic Stage was discontinued and replaced a few years later with MediaGo, which was mainly intended for the Sony PSP but could work with compatible Walkman devices. Sony would later try again in the music market with Quircity, a streaming playroom before being rebranded to PlayStation Music, and then been killed off in favor of Spotify on the PS4.
For a company that has its own major record label, Sony does suck with online music services.
Screensavers & Wallpapers
Theirs a VAIO screensaver bundled which is a bunch of stock photos taken with a few transition effect applied, with stock music being placed in the background.
You can of course customize it with your own photos, or memes if that is more your thing.
Various backgrounds, these would blend in with the laptop design and supported a variety of resolutions (whilst the internal LCD would use its optimal resolution, Sony provided different wallpaper resolution’s in the event you connect an external monitor.
PrintStudio
Appears to be a creative photo editing application where you can import photos from a digital camera (maybe a Sony CyberShot camera) and apply effects or add clip-art to them. You then have the option of printing these out or attaching them as an email. you can also create greeting cards with this, so it acts similar to Microsoft Publisher in a way,
Netscape browser version 6, a popular alternative browser (Didn’t Microsoft discourage OEM’s from doing this? Sony clearly didn’t give a fuck)
Moodlogic
I think this is some sort of last.fm service from before its time, where it will organize and find similar artists depending on the ones currently in your library, whilst organizing your current music collection. This no longer works and requires a connection to a server that is long since defunct. It sort of similar to Apple Genius playlists.
Memory Stick Formater
Formats a Sony Memory Stick, nuff said. Not sure why you can’t do this in Windows Explorer, possibly due to Magic Gate encryption?
Quicken 2004
Software that Sony loved to bundle with their VAIO systems, is some sort of account and spending management software.
AOL
An advert for AOL, looks a bit basic for 2003 standards.
Thinkpads were pretty nice laptops, especially during the late 90s when they pioneered various emerging technologies that were yet to be common. Let’s take a look at a typical OS install that would have shipped with a Thinkpad.
The installer requires the hard disk to be at last initialised, that means having a partition table ready and a partition created. The recovery disk included the FDISK program to create this if its not been done so, and supports the creation of FAT32 partitions.
Once ready, you can start the recovery process, which will inflate the required files. In total this will consume around 600MB of disk space
Initially, this was attempted in VMWare and whilst the first part of the install worked very well, we ran into a few issues. Since our host CPU is over 2.1GHz, we ran into a protection error and were unable to continue without modifying the OS. A patch exists and can be installed. This isn’t a problem in Windows 98SE or Windows ME, but this image contains the first edition of Windows 98 which does have this bug. However at some point the install bricked itself, getting a few errors about missing VXD files, which could be related to the patch above.
Since VM software has issues running these older operating systems, it’s better to use 86Box instead.
86Box
86Box has a few IBM machines emulated, but none from the Pentium II era. Although in theory, we can use any capable motherboard to run the OS, I wanted to use an IBM based machine to better fit the profile however 86Box only has a handful of IBM systems: IBM Valuepoint 60: Has a shit BIOS that only detects a hard drive up to 504MB, the restore image along consume 600MB and we cannot boot from an external SCSI drive IBM PS/ValuePoint 433DX/Si: BIOS is also wack and complains about a config error no matter what combination of hardware I throw at it. Seems to work with larger hard drives but does not boot from a CD-ROM so I had to use Plop boot loader. Whilst I was able to complete the restore and was able to boot into Windows and complete the hardware detection somewhat, after another reboot the system would no longer boot up, giving a non-system disk error IBM PC 330: I couldn’t even get this shit to POST
Overall 86Box didn’t have much going for it in the IBM department for later generation PCs so I ended up using the VirtualPC 2007 based system, which worked easily and was able to boot from CD.
Post Install
When running on completely different hardware you will encounter this hardware detection section, as Windows tries to detect and install various drivers for the motherboard and components used. On the actual ThinkPad system, you will just be taken to the desktop.
This typically takes around 10 minutes to complete, be warned that if you try this on VMWare you will have endless prompts regarding PCI-PCI bridges since VMWare likes to have a lot of these.
Software
The Welcome to Windows screen has been customized by IBM to some extent, as the ThinkPad itself can be seen in the background. I’ve never seen this done by an OEM for Windows 98.
ThinkPad on the Net
A utility to help you sign on for an internet service provider. If you already have one the program will attempt to test the internet connection, but this will fail since the servers are no longer active, the program simply thinks you don’t have an internet connection. It’s also possible this only works for dial-up connections which were popular at the time, and requires a modem.
Product Registration
Presents the opportunity to register your product by answering several questions about you and your life story, along with what you intend to do and what accessories you intend to purchase. This was the good old days when telemetry wasn’t embedded into the OS, so this was the only way to provide feedback to the OEM. Registering your products will reward you with bonus screensavers.
Screensavers
Think 1: The Thinkpad logo flashes around the screen whilst a red dot (TrackPoint) spins around Think 2: Similar to think1 but has an animated image of the laptop itself Saw: Simulates a saw cutting pieces from your desktop, along with a loud saw sound that scared the shit out of me. There is an option to disable the sound thankfully Wreck: A wrecking ball appears and smashes against your desktop background, along with smashing sounds. Window Washer: A Window Washed slides down the screen, taking vertical black stripes from your desktop background Gumballs: A bunch of coloured circles appears on the screen Snore: A floating bed with a guy sleeping in it Ice Cleaner: An Ice cleaner of sorts appears Shuttle Launch: A Shuttle appears and moves on the screen
Wallpapers
There are plenty of wallpapers included, supporting both 800×600 and 1024×768 resolutions.
PC Doctor
A diagnostic program of sorts, which performs a variety of tests. This included the CPU, video card and various devices connected to the system. Very interesting considering we are running in an emulated system.
Shockingly it has failed, although we are emulating a Pentium II, seems the Math coprocessors has issues returning incorrect results.
Let’s give the memory a test…
Looks like it passed, Now for the video
Is it me or can you see watergate…
The Graphics card is an S3 ViRGE (325), This isn’t the graphics card that shipped with the system
The sound test plays a few MIDI and Wave samples
The system Information area gives us details information on the various elements of the system. However here its possible to hard freeze the system
Norton AntiVirus
Included antivirus software that can detect and remove viruses. This version lets you browse through the various virus definitions to see what they do and what parts or side effects they can cause. A Liveupdate feature was available but is no longer functional will return a server error.
IBM Update Connector
Checks for various updates for applications and utilities that came in bundles with your IBM system.
ThinkPad Configuration
A utility that lets you change settings and enable/disable different components of the system. You can configure settings for the sound, game port and TrackPoint itself. These are settings that are typically exclusive to the ThinkPad itself and may not be covered by the Windows settings.
ConfigSafe EZ
Acts like an early form of system restore, which will back up critical system files which can be restored should the need arise.
Snapshots can be taken on a schedule, either daily, weekly, monthly or every time Windows boots up. Files are saved to a CSX image file and total to 1.46MB, which seems to go over the floppy drive limit
IBM HomePage Creator
This takes you to an online page, presumably where you can create an account and sign up for a web hosting service
Shutting Down
Shutting down the system brings up a Norton AntiVirus screen that kinda looks like a BSOD. This just does a quick virus scan before shutdown and lasts for a few seconds, possibly does a boot sector scan to ensure nothing has tampered with the bootloader.
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