I just got an awesome deal. Nice computer speakers, a printer, and a Pentium II running Windows 98 SE + CD-RW and DVD-ROM drives. For $35.


Im planning on a wiping Windows in favor of Ubuntu or some other distro (haven't picked definitely yet).

I plug everything in, connect my DWL-122 USB Wifi dongle and am set right? I have a 10MB/S Wi-Fi connection. The strange thing is that all my downloads are corrupted. Ive tried with Opera, Firefox and IE, none of the programs I download run because the OS says the installers are corrupted. Then I install BitComet (A BitTorrent client) and start downloading the .iso for the Ubuntu Server CD. after a couple hours I had downloaded 600MB of data--525MB of it had been discarded as "junk data". I never had a problem when I was using the DWL-122 on my XP box. is this a problem with Windows or with DWL? has anybody heard of this happening before?

Huh, never heard of that one before. That's really strange...

98 doesn't have plug-and-play for many things (even generic USB flash drives), so the driver may be bad. There's a big exe with tons of drivers for things that aren't included with 98, but I can't remember what it was exactly.

plug and play has nothing to do with it. all my drivers are installed.

and it turns out its all binary data...including servergzipped pages like google...

Wow, weird. Sounds like either a malicious virus, or a really screwed up shell. I'd just reinstall if I were you.

from what? this is a used computer

Im trying to put linux on it, but I can't download the iso. After 3 hours I had downloaded 600 MB via a BitTorrent. 550 of that had gotten discarded as garbage data.


nothing got picked up by Norton or Avast.

You can always order free Ubuntu cds.

it would be nice to get this running before I leave for the summer....

and this is a DIY thing for me.

Don't you have another compy that you can use to d/l Ubuntu? Your primary computer, for example?

true, except I would then have to switch the CD burner onto my primary compy, and DL it with my primary compy taken apart because my primary compy has one of the half-thickness CD drives.

I'd try re-installing both the wifi drivers and the USB drivers, and maybe doing a memtest on it ( www.memtest86.org if i remember right)

@Elfprince: Ah, didn't realize that. Don't you have a USB<-->IDE enclosure? Less than $20 at a place like CompUSA...

I live an hour from the nearest decent electronics store.

@kllrnohj: Im gonna try your advice, if that doesn't work, its time to take apart my main compy and do some transferage of the cd-drivage

[edit]

I dont know what the problem was, but successive restarts seem to have fixed it. if this crops up again, Im gonna have to do some research.