I am the "volunteer technology coordinator" at my kids's elementary school which means I keep the computer lab running (hey, if I didn't there's no telling when the District would get around to it).
The lab instructor asked me about the possibility of getting a "overhead LCD panel" so she could project the screen on the wall for the kids to see.
I happened to have an old Intellimedia "Intelliview" presentation PC. This had a 25mhz 486 with 3 meg ram, 120 meg HD, with Windows 3.1 and powerpoint with a floppy drive to load presentations on it. Not exactly what she had in mind, but it was all I had.
I hit upon using a parallel port ethernet adapter and DOS VNC to paint the panel's screen with whatever was on the instructor's. Only, after fighting with it for a day or so, I gave up on DOS VNC because it would hook up to the remote computer, then promptly crash when it was trying to put up the graphics.
I decided to put in a bigger HD (found a 203 mb hd that the bios recognized), max out the ram at a whopping 7 meg, and hook up a parallel port cdrom and install win 95 and run VNC on win 95.
It took a few hours to install Win 95 with that little ram and slow processor, but the moment was finally reached when the system said it was about to restart to begin final setup. I hit return and walked away, knowing how long it might take to re-boot. I came back to find a black screen with only a blinking cursor on it. I powered down (thinking that maybe something this old didn't reboot cleanly) then switched on to restart.
Nothing. HD spins up, but no video signal whatsover. I don't know what to do. I can't get it to respond in any way. Does anyone (glitch?) have any thoughts as to what might have happened? I will thank you, my kid's school will thank you...
Patrick
psheffield at earthlink dot net
.