Advice on fate of old laptop

GotNoRice

GotNoRice

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Jul 11, 2001
Messages
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My mom got an old laptop and some misc accessories at a garage sale for $30

The specs of the laptop are:
Pentium 2 366Mhz
64megs ram
4.5Gig hard drive

The video didn’t look like anything special, I’ve never actually heard of the brand before. NeoMagic or something like that. It’s a dell.

Right now it has the same windows 95 install it’s probably had since the beginning of time. It actually runs decently fast on there. Ideally I’d like to put at least windows 2000 on there, but I don’t want to slow it down to a crawl. I think I remember trying to run windows 2000 on a computer with 64megs of ram before, and the results weren’t pretty. Combine that with the slow laptop drive it will have to access for virtual memory and…

Do you think it could handle windows 2000? If not, should I try to put 98 on it? NT4?
 
As long as that does not take edo memory which is what a bunch of the early p2 dells did then I would pick up a cheap stick of ram for it then it though be able to load 2000. If not then I would load 98se or it as nt 4 is not the best thing to run on a notebook. As far as the units fate if it has a good screen I would make it a picture frame and hang it on the wall streaming pics off my data server but thats just me.
 
My Sony Vaio PCG-270 (P2-333MHz, 128MB SD Ram, 6.4GB) runs windows 2000. It ran 98 before.
I have the crappy Neomagic as well, 2.5 MB video :rolleyes:
 
I have a pcg-c1x ( pentium 233 with 64MB or ram and it has a neomagic with 2.5MB ram.....and it runs windows xp. just remember that it will take longer to do everything with a newer os than with an older os so... pick the oldest one that you can live with, for me that would be windows 2000
 
Btw who is the manufacturer?

128-192mb and it'll fly with win2k
 
he said its a dell.

you had I have a different definition of "fly"... i can hardly stand a p3 600 with 512mb with 2k
 
Dain Bramaged tonight:eek:
Win2k on my PII is bios to desktop in 15 seconds though it's a mobile, ain't too bad.

I've never had too much luck getting win2k to run well on a PIII, always booting in 35+ seconds
 
Thanks for the advice guys. I did some research and it does use EDO, and it looks like it can only support a max of 128 =/

If i'm lucky, and it has an extra slot I might be able to actually get it to that 128 mark.

I went ahead and put windows2000 on it anyway, and it seems to run OK. I passed on installing anti-virus and stuff since I didn't want anything to bog it down even more than normal.

I guess for word processing and stuff it should work fine. The next step will be trying to get wireless working on it. I'm not sure if the slots are PCMCIA or Cardbus. The Dell Truemobile 1150 I have for wardriving works in there, but it doesn't support WPA and the software to detect the networks wasn't seeing any networks anyway.
 
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