OK, so I bought a used HP Omnibook from eBay. It’s a 1.13 Ghz Celeron CPU, with 128 MB of RAM.
I pop in a brand new XP Pro CD, and get the ‘Press Any Key to Boot from CD’ option, and I press the any key. The computer sits there and thinks for a while, then…usualyl nothing. Once, it said ‘setup is determining your hardware configuration’ then I just got a blank screen. Another time I got some kind of error message about not enough system memory.
Well, it’s installing. Apparantly, it just took a really long time for setup to load. But I think I’m somehow installing it on a FAT32 drive.
The drive was already formatted and partitioned (all 10 gigs of it) for FAT32, and I chose to install on existing parition (I meant to reformat to NTFS, but I hit the wrong choice and expected to get an error message, but it went straight to installing.)
I thought XP had to be installed on an NTFS file system.
Oh, and I was thinking about installing linux on this PC too (either dual boot, or just linux perhaps. I have some spare parts I can make a new PC out of and I might want my copy of XP on that, instead.)
Is it good to put linux on a laptop, and if so, what “type” of linux should I get? (I mgiht start a seperate linux thread…ot hijack that other one in IMHO…)
Nope, it can work on Fat32, and you can convert to NTFS at any time (although I can’t remember how right now!)
If you’re new to Linux, probably put it on a desktop first. Otherwise, you’ll probably find yourself messing around with video settings and suchlike far sooner than you would like. But by all means try a Live CD version on the laptop (Knoppix is often recommended for this, but if you’re impatient then Damn Small Linux is only a 50MB download).
OK, don’t want to start a new thread about this, so here’s a current problem I am having: my laptop can’t connect to the internet.
I use a cable modem. My desktop connects right from it’s network card to the modem, and wham-bam, internet. I don’t recall the goy from time warner ever installing any software. He just scanned in the serial number on the cable modem so that it could gain access under my account, then connected it to my PC, and I could go here and there through cyberspace…so why can’t my laptop?
I get the error message “local area network has little or no connectivity.” I can’t get any IP address, or do anything else. What gives?
First step - go into Network Connections on the desktop, and get all the details of the LAN connection. Use these on the laptop, and it might do the trick.
Power down the cable modem (actually unplug it and let it sit for 30 seconds) ) and power down the notebook. Bring both back up (cable modem first) . See if it connects now. If there is a router or hub involved power cycle these as well.
What ISP do you have? Most likely your ISP is allowing you only one IP address per MAC address, and the one you have is already bound to the NIC on your PC.
With many ISPs (including U.S. ones that start with C, which I’ll assume you’re using for now) you can change the MAC address you can connect with by power cycling your cable modem as astro describes. If this works, you’ll have to do the same thing every time you swap between laptop and PC.
Alternately, you can go through the same steps once and connect your modem to a router, and then add and disconnect equipment to the router at will. With a basic router costing probably 30$US (less with rebates), that’d be my first choice.
For a linux OS, Knoppix or Ubuntu are popular choices, as their Live CD support is quite good.
Actually, it does not begin with a C. My cable company has the initials TW, and the name of the internet serviced is the same as a small bird found in the American Southwest.
I do plan on buying a router at some point (a wireless one at that (I have a wireless PCMCIA card.)) But for know it owuld be nice to be able to get some internet on it to get updates, antivirus, firewall, anti-spyware, etc…
