What do I do with an old laptop?

[Liam Proven]

On 2/22/06, Colin Brace <cb at lim.nl> wrote:
> Some good ideas here...
>
> Now then, what to do with that 40Mhz 386SX Thinkpad I have sitting in
> the closet. 20 MB RAM, 256 MB HD. Other "features": 16 color display
> (one of first active TFT color screens, very sweet at the time), no
> CDROM drive, floppy drive kinda flaky...

Sounds a little like my old Mesh: 386sx/25, mono VGA, 8MB RAM, 80MB
disk. In other words, a paperweight in C21.

Well, mine has DR-DOS 7.03, networking via a D-Link parallel port
Ethernet adaptor, multitasking via DesqView and a choice of GUIs -
FreeGEM, ViewMax and GEOS. It runs WordPerfect 5.1 like lightning. I
confess that I use it very little, but I have done some writing on it,
and I enjoyed the nostalgia trip of setting up DOS on it.

It also has Linux, natch: an installation of a tiny Czech distro, now
long dead, called Pygmy.

With a powerhouse machine like a 40MHz 386 & 20MB RAM, yours will run
Windows 95B (OSR2) quite sweetly. My old Thinkpad 710C - the famous
"Butterfly" model with the folding keyboard - does, tho' it's of a
rather higher spec: 486dx4/75, 40MB RAM. Mine has no CD at all, so I
copied the Win95 install files from a CD in another machine onto it
using LapLink. You could also use DOS 6 InterLink - it'll run fine
from a Win9x boot disk. (Check out www.bootdisk.com for this.) You can
run the Interlink server in a window under Win2000/XP no problem.

Win95B will give you basic multitasking and TCP/IP, over serial,
parallel or a PCMCIA Ethernet card. In 256MB of disk, you'll have to
be sparing, but...

Put IE5.5 on it, update it to the hilt at WindowsUpdate.com, then if
you wish, use Shane Brooks' IEradicator (see www.litepc.com) to remove
the browser but leave the updates. I suggest leaving off any & all of
the optional bits like Windows Media Player or Outlook Express.

I also advise WinSock 2 and Dial Up Networking 1.3 - these update core
parts of Win95.

You could get Opera on there no worries, but in my experience, IE5.5
is as fast or faster.

You could even install Office 95 in that much space; Word95 and
Excel95 will run fine.

Win95B will run quite happily on that, better than Windows 3 would,
and will do power management, multitasking, networking, and should run
PuTTY for connecting to your Ubuntu machines.

Next question? :¬)

--
Liam Proven · http://livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=lproven
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