So, I have an old laptop that I bought froma friend for $40. Not very fast - so old, it has a floppy disk drive. Obviously, its nothing that’s gonna be running Fallout 3 or anything. It is 995mHz, 256mb of RAM, with an ATI Rage Mobility built in graphics card. What are some great, perhaps classic games that it could run? I’m thinking TIE Fighter, Baldur’s Gate, something along those lines. Any genre works - if its good, its good. So, what would you recommend? Aside from getting a new computer, of course.
Civilisation II and Colonisation are two great older games. Turn-based strategy, immense fun.
Heroes of Might and Magic 3 with expansions. If you want to go for the ancient stuff, Master of Magic and Master of Orion via Dosbox.
Sim City, Duke Nuke 'Em, Decent, Heretic, Quake
I’ve always enjoyed a good game of Castle of the Winds on my laptop.
Starcraft and Diablo would run alright.
if you’re going to go the Masters of Orion route, I’d definitely pick up MOO2, great game (I liked it better than one. MOO3, however, was an awful tragedy, and by tragedy I mean piece of shit).
You could probably run Fallout 1 and 2 no problem on that, and even the original Neverwinter Nights if you like Baldur’s Gate type games. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind might run reasonably well on it, too (one of the prequels to Oblivion, though MUCH MUCH better than Oblivion, imo). These are all RPGs, in case you haven’t noticed. I find that old RPGs are still fun, whereas older action games or FPS’s tend to age a lot worse. Even so, you can probably run like Tribes 2 or something on there
Starcraft, Age of Empires … everything else I might suggest has already been suggested. 
Hitman might run.
As a rough rule of thumb stuff from around '99-'00 would be the sweet spot for you (I’m assuming that it doesn’t have a “high end” video card from that point).
So let me look here… the Thief series are obvious picks. The original Half-Life should run fine with that set up. Rounding out the action games there was Deus Ex. If you liked the Civilization games then Alpha Centauri was the most recent in the series at that point. Railroad Tycoon 2 was pretty good. On the RPG front there’s nothing like Planescape: Torment (and someone just released additional content for it a few months ago) but the Fallout series are also good. Neverwinter Nights might actually be pushing it just slightly though if you have a 3d video card then I expect it will work reasonably well with the graphics turned down.
(And I swear you people call anything from more than three or four years ago “very old” just to get a rise out of me. If it doesn’t have vacuum tubes it’s not a “very old” computer. 
)
If your computer can manage it, Baldur’s Gate 2 is a real improvement over the original.
Fallout and Fallout 2 should run pretty well, along with the original Grand Theft Auto…
What OS is it running? You can strip this down so it uses less of your resources.
Research your MB, you may be able to max out your CPU and RAM for a couple of dollars.
Depends what you’re into, really. TIE fighter will suck on a laptop (no joystick is hell. Seriously. When I was a kid, my best friend and I used to play X-Wing with a mouse. Yeah, good luck catching the fast, nimble ships like the TIE Interceptor) but **Freelancer **will certainly work on a 1 Gig rig (the min specs are 600 Mhz, 128 Mb RAM), and is a charm even with a mouse. And it’s a friggin’ great game.
It could have been a great game, but they filled the sandbox with walled partitions and didn’t put in any content except the linear-as-hell main storyline. I really wanted it to be Morrowind in space, but despite having all the required basic elements it just fails badly.
The Ur-Quan Masters (aka Star Control II) should run okay on your machine. A nice one-on-one third-person space combat game stapled to a pretty good RPG-style campaign; you DO need to keep a notebook (or use online walkthroughs) if you’re going to play the campaign, since you can’t replay conversations and don’t get a quest log thing, and you get a lot of starmap coordinates in the form of 735.98 x 834.23 to keep track of. It’s available for free download; just google “urquan masters” and it should be the first or second hit.
I’d say the earlier SimCities are worth playing. If you can find it, I think that TIE Fighter is an absolute classic and you don’t even need to be a Star Wars fan. It’s the best space fighter sim I’ve ever played hands down.
thanks everyone… I think Thief and Baldur’s Gate 2 are in my near future.
oooh Freelancer, that was a great game. Definitely had it’s problems and often forced you into linear paths, but there was a lot there.
And Deus Ex, the original, not the sequel, was also a fan-freakin-tastic game
Betrayal at Krondor
Dungeon Keeper 1/2 will probably run.
Kohan: Ahriman’s Gift, or, if you can’t find that one, the original Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns. Nothing graphically fierce about these games, but the strategy is deep and the game is well put together. (It gets my award for having one of the best designed UIs I’ve ever played with.)