The sad quiet death of computer and console magazines

Have you been to your local newsagent to buy a magazine recently? No?

You would be quite surprised if you went to one ten years ago, and then went to a newsagent these days (assuming it is still open for business). So many have closed in recent years.

This is the "Computer magazine section" in a local newsagent here in Australia in September 2025.

Most Newsagents I have seen in Australia now sell loads of stationery, occasion cards, act as agents for selling Lotto tickets, and do work under contract as agents for delivery/shipping companies (eg. Australia Post, DHL, UPS and others).

The newsagent shops in Australia are often full of undelivered packages, cluttering up the remaining tiny magazine display space which is always empty of people. Birthday/occasion cards dominate the previously full magazine display stands. 

The lines of people in the newsagent you see sometimes are for the post office delivery collection and for buying Lotto tickets...

The reality is that in 2025 very few people are still buying magazines from newsagents. In Adelaide's Central Business District (CBD), all but one newsagent in Rundle Mall have already shut down. 

I visited that newsagent in the city last weekend. They have a slightly larger selection of magazines than my local, but still very small indeed, with many copies of the same magazine across multiple locations to fill it out, as below:

So where has the magazine audience gone?

These days, on the internet you can see everything you ever wanted to know about pretty much any topic. 

Any new or old computer or console, any new or old game, application, tool or device. Read or view in real time - from the comfort of your smartphone or tablet.

Just search for and watch a short video on YouTube (as below), or watch development of new games live on Twitch, or read detailed posts about newly released devices on a blog. 

Such content is created within a few hours of a product release anywhere in the world. 

We get notified on our smartphones and tablets that something has happened and we can check it out, or use an AI tool to summarise it if we are too lazy or time poor to watch 5-10 minutes of content.

I can also watch short review or full long play videos online of any game ever made that I want to play. For any platform, current or old.

If that is not enough, I can watch popular streamers live playing these games and talk directly with developers who are often present on popular streams to gauge real time feedback and suggestions. I can save the videos to my smartphone or tablet device to watch later on a plane or train trip.

Take, for example, the latest release Hollow Knight: Silksong game on console (Switch 1/2) and Steam (PC/Mac/Linux) this past week. 

This game is made by talented local Adelaide developers Team Cherry over the past 7 years. 

First, let's check out YouTube and Twitch - Hollow Knight Silksong full and quick reviews, play throughs and live streams - huge quantities of instant content for you to consume...5.6 million people watched the release trailer alone!

You can see exactly what the game looks like and plays like - you don't need to rely on the reviewer - you can see it, and hear for yourself without buying it. 

I can do a quick search on Facebook, which has plenty of videos showing the game, and feedback to read.

Using Twitch (shown below), YouTube live or Kick, you can watch many people playing the game all around the world in real time and in your local language. 

You can ask questions in chat in real time too, to make the decision to buy it or not even easier - over 8,000 people are watching just one Twitch streamer in real time playing Hollow Knight Silksong during my lunch time Adelaide time (in the screenshot below):

In addition, you can debate Hollow Knight Silksong news items, product reviews or stories in real time with your similarly minded colleagues on Discord, Facebook, WhatsApp, BlueSky, X, Telegram, Tik Tok, YouTube, Line, Web forums or other social media platforms. 

Great game by the way, and I bought it on Steam. Sadly no physical box release yet.

I am so glad to see local game dev alive and well in Adelaide in 2025.

Continuing this example, you can get feedback from developers who worked on it directly or other knowledgable game players via the official Hollow Knight Discord channel. 

Discord channels have different sections for different topics, sort of like a web forum website but much more interactive between the users and in real time. Voice channels are also setup and available for active discussion about the game in real time.

As I screenshotted the discord channel below, note at the top of the right pane that there are over 55,000 people online at lunch time on a Tuesday in the official Hollow Knight Discord channel - just for this one game! 

*This* is where all the magazine audience has gone.

Would you write an email for a future Magazine letters page asking for help to get an answer in a few months. Why bother, when you can get an instant answer in Discord, watch a long play in YouTube or watch full review and play through in realtime with all tips and tricks shown!

So why would anyone buy a magazine released at least 1-2 months afterwards with delayed and limited coverage of what they are interested in? 

They don't. And they aren't.

So the magazine companies are selling up, amalgamating multiple titles into one as readership and revenue from ad companies plummets, and then closing them down and disappearing. 

Quietly up until ten years ago, but much more rapidly in recent years. It is a generational shift.

This situation in 2025 is VERY different to what used to happen with magazines covering obsolete computer and console platforms. 

In those eras in the 1980's and 1990's, when the platforms life came to an end, the specialist magazine closed as people moved on to newer platforms, with new magazines to cover them. For example: OS/2, Amstrad, C64, Atari ST and Amiga users moved on to Windows, Mac and Linux magazines.

Web forums were in their infancy in the mid-late 1990's - mostly places like usenet - and there was no YouTube, no Facebook, no Twitch, no Steam, no Discord, no WhatsApp. No DLC, no "fremium" games, no micro-transactions in games to progress, no games dependent on online internet servers to run. Operating system patches and games were actually finished and tested fully internally before they were released to the public, back when Kickstarters, Early access, DevOps and Agile development processes didn't exist. 

Yikes, I feel much older after typing all that.

Magazines were how we found out about what was happening in the world of tech, and we trusted their reviewers to give us the scoop on whether a piece of hardware, system, game or application was worth getting or not.

Now in 2025, this is not happening with current computer and console platforms. The platforms are not obsolete yet, but the magazines are still gone - even the magazines that are available in Digital form on tablets and smartphones for many years!

Where is "Official Nintendo magazine", "Official Xbox magazine", "Official Playstation magazine", "PC Format", "Official Windows magazine", or MacWorld to cover current developments for current platforms in 2025? 

They don't exist. They are all gone. Years ago. Did you notice? Possibly not.

Young gamers were the first to move away from magazines and now almost everyone has, for the reasons I showed with Hollow knight Silksong example earlier.

Specialist platform magazines are also quietly disappearing. 

I saw Computer Music magazine, Linux Format, 3D World, Australian MacWorld and MacUser have also now closed.

Multi-format magazines are also mostly gone in the last ten years - C&VG, Electronics Gaming Monthly, Game Informer, Megazone, Games(tm), Games Master and many others. 

Specialist magazines also got the axe. None of the magazines below is still around as a physical printed magazine today (except PC Pro).

Commodore magazines are mostly long gone, but already I covered in a previous blog post about Amiga magazines from 1985 to 2022, and their amazing continued run despite the decimation of computer magazines elsewhere around the world. Please read that article for more detail on Amiga magazines!

Here are some of the older Amiga and Commodore magazines (definitely not all of them - see my blog post for more details) 

So what is left?

"Edge" magazine is one of the few multi-format magazines to still survive in 2025 - but seriously, take a look at the tiny thin size and page count of it. Other US and UK specialist magazines such as "PC Pro" and "Admin Network & Security" magazine are also still around in 2025. There are probably others that I can't get here in Australia, and I am only looking at English language magazines.

I bought Retro Gamer and PC Pro latest issues from the newsagent here in September 2025 (note we get magazines one or two months later than they are released in the UK/US. 

Ironically PC Pro magazine this month is running a feature about 30th anniversary of Windows 95 in 2025! :-)

Some Retro related magazines like Retro Gamer, recent new specialist Retro computer/console related magazines like Amiga Addict, re-started Zzap 64/Amiga, Boing, Amiga Future, Freeze64, K&A Plus, and similar have also survived. 

Amongst the negativity, it's good to see there are several Amiga and C64 magazines are still available in 2025!

This I believe is because there is still some new software and hardware released for the C64 and Amiga, and an entire generation keen to learn more about their childhood computing/console history from Retro Gamer. 

There are also other old magazines like Compute's Gazette, Crash and Sega Force that have been resurrected under new owners in 2025 with new issues being released for the Retro computing/gaming community.

Luckily there are plenty of remaining developers and company executives still around to tell those stories as exclusives to those magazines, and AmigaOS continues to be developed in 2025 with new games also! 

I am glad this type of magazine is still around as I enjoy these too, but it is generational. Buy them while you can!

The next generation sadly couldn't care less about magazines or physical box classic game content. They seem totally engrossed with digital game licensed (with DLC upsell) gaming consoles, smartphones and tablets. This is when they are not live streaming or sharing snapchat, telegram, instagram, YouTube, Kick and Twitch content to their online friends and discussing in real time via Discord, etc. 

This is not limited to the home either. IRL (In Real Life) live streaming, emojis and chat are replacing magazines, real conversations and text for a new generation. 

Next generation adults are now watching YouTube shorts and Tik Tok videos - they last 1 minute or less. Their attention span has narrowed for whatever reason, and the need for companies to adapt ads to get eyeballs onto sponsored content to make money still rolls on without magazines. 

Content quality and quantity has consequently reduced in favour of shoddy clickbait, constant pestering for subscriptions and likes, and deliberate drawing out videos to meet minimum eyeball viewing time statistics for payments from platforms like YouTube. 

You probably know the sort of thing. 

Terrible "YouTube watch party live streams", YouTube videos reviewing of other people's popular videos, Unboxing videos, AI generated artwork, AI voice overs and AI generated videos are being released for a generation too lazy or not willing to spend the time to create their own content, all to make a quick buck. 

How many AI generated videos do you watch and learn something useful from?

Detailed quality reviews (blog or video) are rapidly becoming a thing of the past - except on my Epsilon's World blog of course :-) 

All of my content is written 100% by me and all photos and screenshots taken by me - no AI generation tools, or image perfecting processing used. I bought everything myself with my own money from working full time - no patreon money, kickstarters or shady pre-order schemes. And I make no money from it - I do this because I love it. I must be crazy.

Is this change a bad thing? I think you can be the judge of that. 

Given the situation, I decided to get a selection of these closed down computer/console magazines that people are chucking out while there are some still to be had. You have already seen some of them earlier in this post.

For me, particularly sad is the death of nearly all local Australian magazine content. No one talks much about Australian magazines, so I will!

Australia used to have so many different computer/console related magazines on the shelves. Above and below is a sample - a number of US/UK "official" computer and console magazines also had dedicated Australian versions with their own local content mixed in:

Atomic PC was a great Australian PC gaming hardware and software magazine that sadly closed in 2012 - the photo of Atomic magazine with the :-( at the top of this blog post was their last issue.

Australian PC User magazine was around for years (since 1990) before being rebranded in 2012 into Tech Life magazine, which was itself finally discontinued in 2022.

Hyper magazine was a popular local multi-format gaming magazine that lasted from 1993 until it stopped 26 years later in 2019.

Official Nintendo Magazine, Official Windows magazine, Official Playstation magazine (later rebranded to Play), Game Informer, Australian Game Pro, and MacWorld Australia (1985-2018) were local licensed versions of the US/UK original magazines with local Australian content added. All are now discontinued.

 

We also had older Australian magazine titles like Your Computer (1981-1997), Megazone (1988-1995), OZ Amiga (1991-1992), Australian Commodore & Amiga Review (1996), and Professional Amiga User (1990-1992)

With a few exceptions like PC PowerPlay and Australian Personal Computer (APC), there are basically no other locally produced Australian computer magazines left in 2025. 

Note: Silicon Chip is an electronics magazine, before someone local points it out - I know. Also, JB Hifi's Stacked "magazine" is not a magazine - just a long form advertisement for all their products dressed up as a "magazine".

If I missed any other local Australian computer/console magazines still sold as physical magazines in 2025, please let me know! 

I bought both those Australian produced magazines below in September 2025 - APC has been released every month since 1980 - it's now 45 years old! PC Powerplay magazine has been released since 1996, so next year will be 30 years!

I paint a bleak picture about magazines future in 2025 because it is bleak. Very.

I am glad to see that Australian government is working to preserve copies of Australian produced computer magazines so they will not be lost forever as the world moves on.

I openly wonder how will content created on Discord and other walled garden social media applications be preserved in the future after they are inevitably discontinued and their supporting servers turned off?

For now sadly, the magazine as you and I know it, is dying. Forever. I believe it will not return once it is gone.

In ten years, I predict no one will be able to buy a magazine in a newsagent - they simply won't exist. 

Your children's kids/grand kids will grow up not even knowing what a magazine is, the same way as your kids don't know what a floppy disk, DAT tape, Minidisc, cassette or Iomega zip disk is today.

Technology moves on. People move on. Not all progress is good progress, but it is what it is. 

While we older people may wipe away a tear, I assure you the next generation is losing no sleep over the quiet death of magazines in 2025.

So here on my blog I wanted to show and preserve a small piece of what are wonderful memories for me - the humble and long lasting computer and console magazine. 

You can also read more detailed videogame magazine history on the very excellent Forgotten Worlds website. Many scanned collections of these old magazines are available on archive.org and elsewhere on the internet if you want to read them without further filling your house or apartment with old magazines!

I have a special thanks to everyone who has ever worked on, or written an article for, any computer or console magazine in any era. 

Especially I want to acknowledge those still creating magazines and content in 2025 for the tiny remaining audience. I do my best within my financial means to support those who continue to produce magazine content in a format that is now considered "old fashioned and obsolete".  

Like most others, in 2025 I have embraced the new tech as well, but I love magazines still - the fact I kept so many old magazines to remind me of that era, and still buy 2025 new release magazines from overseas and occasional issues of local magazines should hopefully prove that!

Windows NT4 laptop build on Dell Latitude CPx

 It is hard to believe anyone would be, but I find myself in 2025 a bit nostalgic for the days using Windows NT 4 workstation systems.

Yeah, I know. I should probably seek professional help.

For non-business users, Windows NT 4 had endless driver problems causing blue screens, no plug and play support, limited USB support, and limited device and game compatibility due to DirectX 3 being the maximum version (or OpenGL support).

And yet..it was incredibly successful. Why? Because it was a business oriented operating system that most companies of the era used. Pure and simple.

People didn't buy Windows NT 4 to play games and demos. They bought it to use Microsoft Office, Visio, Project, ERP clients, and other business applications. They used Lotus Notes or Microsoft Outlook connected to back end Lotus Domino R5 or Exchange 5.5 servers hosted on Windows NT 4 Server with Windows NT domain controllers. They ran PC Anywhere to enable remote support via local network or over a modem connection. Yep, that modem support was painful - I did it.

I know well about Windows NT 4. I built lots of them.

Actually, when I started working in IT professionally in the late 1990's, fresh out of university, I found a Windows for Workgroups 3.11 work environment, running purely workgroups and unmanaged network switches. 

No domain controllers, no back end Exchange servers, and no internet (except for the finance/HR director and CEO with 56k dial up modems!). 

Active directory didn't arrive until Windows 2000 Server, unless of course you ran Novell Netware Groupware which had something eerily similar for years that Microsoft...errmm...copied to create Active Directory services..

I had started learning how to build Windows NT 4 while at university. Not at the university IT courses, but at home. I bought Windows NT 4 workstation academic edition and focused on teaching myself all about it. Outside the IT department, all other departments at the uni were using NT 4. My dad's work and customers were using it.

It turned out I really needed to focus on NT 4 server, but I couldn't afford that as a poor uni student!

I quickly learnt in my first job as a IT Systems Administrator though, and built many Windows NT 4 servers, and also deployed hundreds of Windows NT 4 workstation computers, connected to the Windows NT 4 servers across 40 or so office locations across Australia.

I learnt how to build Applications and databases, investigated and fixed many Y2K issues for multiple databases, configured Remote Access services to sync data from remote offices over modem from Palm Pilots, laptops, manufacturing barcode implementation and much more besides.

I also learnt how to code HTML and ASP on Windows NT4.

So, as you can see, I have a lot of history with it, and I decided I should have a Windows NT 4 workstation machine in my setup at home.

I decided to go with a period correct business Dell Latitude CPx laptop. It supports Windows NT4 and has a driver CD on the internet to give me the all important NT4 drivers.

It also has a unique party piece - It has a modular bay that support CD-ROMs, floppy drives and a ZIP250 drive!

At first I thought I scored really well with my choice - it arrived in good condition.

It came with the CD-ROM module and the floppy drive module, along with the power supply. There was no Zip 250 drive module, but I sourced one from the USA. While I was waiting for it, I took a look at this machine. 

On the left side is the dual PCMCIA (PC-Card) slots which are very important as many of this era laptops didn't have network ports or WiFi in them, Also on this left side is the hard disk behind a screw secured slot:

I opened it up and it looked very clean indeed. As was usual for this era, the computer has a accupoint trackpoint mouse embedded in the centre of the keyboard, and a touchpad at the bottom - so two sets of left and right buttons.

Looking on the right side now, I have the usual Audio out, headphone and Mic input, a S-Video output connector for TV and IR port for connection to other IR devices like Printers, PDA's and more. 

The front of the laptop has the battery module in the left side, and the CD-ROM module in the right side:

Flipping the laptop over I see the triangle shaped release buttons for removing the battery and CD-ROM modules.

It has a product key for Windows 98 second edition, and indeed that is the system installed on the laptop when I received it.

At the back of the laptop is power input a Serial port, a PS/2 keyboard/mouse input, single USB port (useless with NT4), docking station connector, Parallel port and VGA port.

I removed the modules from the laptop, and put them alongside the floppy drive:

I slid the floppy drive module in and confirmed it does indeed fit this laptop, which is a relief!

Sadly the modules only fit the right hand side bay. The left side only fits the battery. The right side can accept a second battery though to give a much longer battery life for business road warriors.

It is easy to forget just how clunky, fragile and heavy these laptops were in this era. 

We are spoilt these days with sleek lightweight and strong metal framed laptops. This was a typical business laptop of the period. Heavy, loads of plastic, and fragile.

As it was sent to me, the laptop has a small noisy spinning 12GB IDE hard disk. This laptop has a Pentium II 650Mhz, 256MB memory, ATI graphics card with 8MB memory, ESS Maestro 3 sound card, and a CD-ROM drive (with swappable floppy drive)

Interestingly the BIOS includes a useful battery level information screen, covering both module bays if you have two batteries installed in it.

Given the age of the machine, I expect the battery will be useless. I keep it connected to power whenever I use it.

I fixed the time/date and booted the system into Windows 98.

It booted relatively quickly, and soon into the Windows 98 desktop:

Satisfied the system worked, I shut down and set to work removing the hard disk.

As is usual for this era, the hard disk tray encloses the standard IDE hard disk with a custom connector.

I remove the custom connector to IDE converter, as I will need it to connect to my planned Windows NT4 build CF card converter.

I connected it up and then re-installed it back into the tray.

I then slid the whole thing back into the hard disk bay. It was at this point I noticed a crack in the top of the laptop base. I realised that the screen locking mechanism had caused the plastic to fail at a stress point.

I ignored it for now since I was not closing the laptop lid while working on the build. 

I booted into the BIOS to make sure the new 32GB hard disk was detected correctly - it was.

So, next I inserted the Windows NT 4 workstation CD into the drive and booted from it.

The setup screen came up and I thought great, this is going to work.

And then it didn't. Windows NT setup couldn't find the hard disk.

The CF card is prepped with FAT32, and Windows NT 4 doesn't support it. But that is not the only problem - it can't find the disk at all. It shouldn't care about the partitions, since it can wipe them anyway.

I rebooted to try it again.

I put some tape over the broken plastic on the laptop as I didn't want it to get worse - not sure why it chose now to fail, but it is what it is. It is quite old after all and brittle plastic is normal for laptops of this age.

For whatever reason, the second time I run the Windows NT setup, it found the hard disk just fine.

I deleted the old FAT32 partition, and setup a new partition using the whole disk:

This failed. I remembered why - it is because until Service Pack 4, Windows NT 4 could only be installed on a 4GB partition or lower. My CD is not a Service Pack 4 patched install CD.

I delete the 32GB NTFS partition, prepped a new 4096MB (4GB) partition and left the rest of the disk empty. I will add the other partition once Service pack 4 is installed.

The Windows NT4 installation then proceeded as normal:

It then reached the reboot phase. I removed the CD, rebooted and...nothing. It didn't boot at all. Sigh.

I suspected the cause was the MBR on the hard disk wasn't written correctly. I change the CD-ROM module to a floppy module and booted from the Windows 98 setup floppy disk to a command prompt.

This had the nice side effect of confirming the floppy drive module also works well!

I ran fdisk from the floppy disk, and deleted and prepared a FAT partition of 4096MB.

Note that when creating a partition this way, I need to set it active.

When that is done, the status 'A' appears next to the partition.

I then exit and run fdisk /mbr, which formats the drive with a Master Boot Record (MBR) scheme for the hard disk.

I then re-ran the Windows NT 4 workstation setup from the CD again, and this time all worked as expected. It booted from the hard disk after the first phase with no problems.

Yay, I can now setup Windows NT 4 the way I want.

Go straight to the Custom install for IT administrators - I have built hundred of these machines...

I install pretty much everything available, since I don't want to have to install it again later from CD. I fished out my 3Com Etherlink PCMCIA card, which I plan to use for networking from this laptop.

Install completed, reboot time!

I booted into the standard 640x480x16 colour desktop. I copied the I386 folder from the install CD to the hard disk. This is because when Windows NT4 needs system files from the original CD, it gets them from this folder. If you have it on the hard disk, you can point the system to it and avoid fishing out the CD - it is also way faster to copy the files...

In this era, CD's autoran - I inserted the Windows NT4 Service Pack 3 CD first as I need to patch Windows NT 4. In this case a web interface pops up in Internet Explorer to provide instructions on how to install SP3.

In reality, I needed to install Service Pack 4, then lastly Service Pack 6. This took quite a while.

Later Windows NT 4 applications need SP4 or SP6 to work, included many system drivers. That is why I have waited until I got to SP4 before I installed the drivers for the laptop from the resource CD.

PC Card drivers, audio, video, Intel chipset, and many more..

Having the video drivers installed meant that after a reboot I could finally use all of that lovely screen:

I quickly increased the resolution:

I thought it was 12780x1024, but turns out I was wrong. It is 1024x768.

Makes such a difference - I have room to work now on the desktop:

Lost count how many times I looked at this Windows NT 4 log in page - very nostalgic:

As you probably know, machines of this era should not be connected to the internet. They have so many security holes, and can be compromised quickly and in turn, compromise your home network too.

I installed a pile of patches and security updates I have on a CD I prepared and kept from that era when I built these machines - once again it is very helpful.

I also installed the NT4 option pack CD, which has the all important Personal Web services (IIS) for hosting your websites on your local computer. This is another CD I kept from that era.

When I first learned to code HTML and ASP, it was using a IIS setup on NT 4 workstation. I learnt how to query databases via ODBC in my websites. I kept some of that code, and wanted to have it setup on this laptop also, since a lot of the code no longer works on newer machines due to reliance on VBScript, Javascript, Java VM and other long obsolete web technologies.

I set to work configuring the Personal Web server.

With that done, I turned my attention to the partition setup. 

Service Pack 4 was installed, so I could now prep the hard disk second partition to use the remaining drive space on the 32GB hard disk. I put Service Pack 6 on first though.

 

I then used Disk Administrator to create the new partition and format NTFS.

A little quirk with Windows NT is the need to change the CD drive letter from D:\

 to a later drive letter, in this case F:\. 

This is so I can align the second partition which initially uses E:\ to use D:\. This is because when you remove the CD drive module, it will screw with the drive letter allocations...

Once done I set the CD drive letter to E:\

Now I have heaps of room:

I set to work installing Microsoft Office XP, which is the last version of Office that works on Windows NT4.

I then installed WinAmp (as you have to in this era!), and listened to some mp3's from a CD I copied to my new blank D:\ partition.

I was pretty happy at this point. I fired up Outlook XP, and imported my mailbox from the 2000-2001 era. It send me a reminder that I was 1193 weeks late for my intro the supervision training course. Oops.

The setup was nice, but I wanted more space for my MP3 collection library, which together with my friend Mark we wrote a special website to index, display and play back these files. This needed the personal web server also.

I have a compact flash adapter PCMCIA card, which I plan to use for this, using a 64GB CF Card.

As before, this CF card uses FAT32 by default, so I need to format it before Windows NT 4 can use it.

The Softex PC Card controller software from the driver resource CD detects when I insert a PC card, and prompts me to configure the CF card to work with this system:

I then go to Disk Administrator to format the drive. As this is a removable disk, the drive letter is not so important. I was using this CF card for Amiga stuff before, so the partition map shows 32GB in use with a unknown partition.

I formatted the drive as NTFS and created one partition using the whole disk:

Now I have even more room.

I then took the CF card out of the PC card slot, and connected the CF to USB converter to the Windows 11 computer to copy my MP3 library from that era to it.

I then removed the Windows NT 4 CF card from the internal hard disk bay to image it on the Windows 11 PC for safe keeping.

This is where it all went wrong. The imaging process crashed out halfway, and rendered my CF card useless! I couldn't get it to be recognised in any computer! It was not detected by MacOS, Windows or Amiga. It was like the CF card just DIED.

All that work. For nothing. 

I was so angry. I put the whole lot in the cupboard and forgot about it for a few weeks.

I bought another 64GB CF card, and started over when I felt like trying again. I installed the 64GB CF card in the hard disk bay and checked it was detected from the BIOS - all good.

I won't bore you with the details of the rebuild, since it follows the same steps I already did.

I'll pick up from where I left off. 

By this stage I had received the Iomega Zip250 drive module for this laptop from the USA, which is what prompted me to have another go at building the machine. 

I want to use the Dell Latitude Zip 250 to help with data transfer to my Amiga systems, like the one I installed in the Amiga 4000T recently. 

I hope eventually to have a USB chip drive to connect to the Mac Studio or PC, but they are crazy expensive and so many don't work anymore and driver support is limited now. 

So this laptop is an intermediate machine that happily works with ZIP drives but can access modern local network shares to copy data I need to transfer!

After rebuilding the system the same as I did before, I installed the Zip drivers and applications, and installed the Zip250 drive module into the laptop.

To be honest, after the built-in Minidisc music drive with remote controller in the Vaio desktop I bought a few years ago, I didn't think I would be surprised by anything for computers of this era, but a Zip 250 drive for a PC laptop certainly did. It was the reason I chose this laptop.

The installation of the software went fine, and it detected the Zip250 drive module, which is great!

The Zip Drive icon appeared in My Computer, and I was ready to test it.

I have several PC formatted Zip disk (100MB) from one of the ZIP drives I bought previously, so it was easy to try out.

The zip drive does stick out a bit from the laptop form factor compared to the CD-ROM and floppy disk modules, but not too bad. 

I am pleased to say the Zip drive reads and writes zip disks well! Very happy.

With the recent work setting up Zip drives on my Amiga systems, this laptop will prove very useful for transferring data to those machines, since this machine is new enough that the PCCard CF card can be read/write from the Mac Studio and Windows 11 PC systems. I can then copy files to the Zip drive and read on the Amiga systems without network or USB access.

To complete the build, I installed some period correct games that work on Windows NT 4. 

I lost count of how many hours I spent playing Age of Empires 1 and Starcraft on my work laptop in hotels at night when travelling around Australia.

I know I can play the remastered Age of Empires on Steam using my modern PC too, but running it like this just *feels* right.

 I have done some work on this laptop to re-instate some personal websites to work on the web server, but these websites reveal more personal information than I want to share in this blog, so I will not show that here. I am happy it (mostly) worked as I had planned it though!

For now, this is where I will leave this build. I hope you found this interesting!