Gadgetopia

Here’s a lifesaver of a Web site. I was given an old Gateway 2000 P5-60 to rebuild for a local charity. Problem was, it had Windows 95 loaded from five 3.5” diskettes, so its BIOS had no CD-ROM support. I couldn’t get the thing to boot from the Windows 98 set-up CD. Frustrating.

BootDisk.com has a bunch of boot disk images from every possible configuration, and all of them have CD-ROM support. They download in a little EXE that, when run, writes the image to a floppy. Very, very handy. Very smooth.

Here’s some trivia for you: The term “booting” is a shortened form of the term “bootstraping.” Since a computer needs an operating system to do anything, and when it starts it has none, it has to “pull itself up by its own bootstraps” and load its own OS. Hence the term “bootstraping” and the shortened form, “booting.”