[TimeCapsule] COSI – Computer Oem Support Information 1.0

Information

This project is a so called Time Capsule Project, which means that it is a project which I made way back in the earlier days of my programming. Most of these project had never seen the ‘daylight of the internet’ and I thought it would be fun to have a small ‘glimpse back into the past’ on some of my older projects. You can read more about the XNL Future Technologies Time Capsule here.

This one in particular was a small util I wrote for a company where I did an internship. That company used to build, sell and repair lots of consumer computers back in the day and they always added their support information to those systems manually. So during my internship I thought it would be a good idea to write this nifty little tool for them so that adding their support information would be A LOT faster and easier for them. And they definitely appreciated my efforts a lot. So much even that when I left the intern ship they gave me a present: The Philips SLA5500 (website is in Dutch only), which was actually my first network music streaming device 😊. This appreciation was not only due to COSI obviously, but also due to some other small tools I had written custom for their company (which was by the way not part of my internship!) and due to the overall performance during my internship. So thanks for that guys 😊

With COSI you can (could) add OEM information to the System Information screen (which you could open by right-clicking on My Computer and then clicking on Properties).
You could add your Company name, Computer model, company/support logo, and several additional (5) support information lines. Aside from that COSI also supported adding ‘branding text’ to the title bar of Internet Explorer 6 (which was a thing many OEM builders did back then), and it could set the default homepage of Internet Explorer to the company website all in one click. Additionally COSI could also install a default wallpaper on each computer you used it on (this could for example be a wallpaper from your company).

You could enter/setup all the information once (the OEM logo, company data, support information etc), then copy COSI to an USB stick for example and run it straight from the USB. Then with one click all the OEM information would be installed into the customers computer at once. So in less than 5 seconds you could ‘OEM Brand’ the computer.

Written in Visual Basic 6 never published online
COSI 1.0 was originally written in Visual Basic 6, never released on the internet and only shared between a couple local (in my hometown) computer stores.

2024 (Re-Release) Update
For the first ‘official public release’ of COSI 1.0 (after almost 18 years now!), I did not changed anything to the program/executable at all.
I only added an additional information page to the COSI Manual.pdf (which is included in the zip file)
– Removed the (old) email address from the about screen

No source code available
Sorry, but if you where hoping to see or get the source code for COSI 1.0, then I would have to disappoint you. Unfortunately I’ve lost the source-code many years ago (as you can read on the XNL Future Technologies Time Capsule Information Page), due to this only the binaries can be downloaded.

Want to try the ‘vintage version’ of COSI 1.0 but having issues?
Please read the instructions tab for more information if you are (for funs) trying to get this software to work.