Book of Hook

Zshainya · Joined: 29 Apr 2004 Posts: 112

I have an old Compaq laptop with Win98, 333mhz processor, 160mb ram and 4 gig hard drive and 4mb of vram.

Anyone have any novel ideas for what it could be used for, other than a doorstop? It's been sitting in my closet for a couple years now. I was thinking I might get a wireless USB or card for it and just use it for surfing the net.

brianhook · Posted: Thu May 20, 2004 3:15 pm Post subject:

For Web surfing around the house that's an ideal system. Might need more RAM though if you want to run a modern operating system like winxp.

BlueGhost · Joined: 01 May 2004 Posts: 257

I'm getting visions of linux wireless meshbox type things or a plain wireless AP.
_________________
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gtbass · Joined: 04 Jan 2004 Posts: 200

What resolution is the LCD? If all it is doing is sitting in a box, I might consider buying it from you for ~$50 ;)

Satori · Joined: 24 Dec 2009 Posts: 1

Sorry to resurrect this ancient post, but I have just such a system. It's great to keep in a garage or workshop. It's a huge convenience not to have to run back into the house to look something up really quick -- especially if you are dirty from whatever your project might be. And since it's an otherwise useless machine you don't have to worry too much about getting it dirty or a little broken.

I feel that installing Linux with a light weight WM, web browser, PDF viewer, and even OpenOffice.org is a perfect use for such a machine. It takes a little while to boot up but, once you have your WM loaded, it really is more snappy than you would expect compared to a MS OS.

If you can up the ram to 256 MB it would be perfectly suitable to run the full KDE 3.5.x DE -- just don't try using KDE 4.x on it. KDE 4 needs more than 512 MB of RAM or you'll be waiting 5 minutes every time you try to do anything. The plasma-desktop part of KDE will use more than 256 MB just by itself.

EDIT:

P.S. http://apt.pearsoncomputing.net/cdimages/ is what I'm running on mine, which is a version of the latest Kubuntu release using KDE 3 instead of KDE 4. It's easy to install and retrieves current updates without pestering you to add KDE 4. However, unless you can upgrade your RAM to 256 MB you're probably better off with either Win9x or a light weight WM on Linux.