Compaq presario 700 128 mb ram. Not sure of the ghz but am sure the ram dates it. Probably 10 years old. Battery is dead, but I have the power cord. Was going to put Ubuntu on it, but the updater hung on it. I haven’t even tried to restart it since. Worked good before I screwed with the os. I am going to fool around with it for a little while, any good ideas of what to do with it?. Can I put an older os in it that won’t require all the ram just to run the os itself?
If you want to put Linux on it, there are a number of lightweight distributions intended for older hardware. I have heard that Puppy Linux, a live cd distro, works well on really old hardware. I have never tried it. I have only ever played with Linux, but one of its virtues is that it is very customizable. If you are willing to put in the time and skull sweat, you can do pretty much anything you want.
Other than that, you could combine that laptop with USB hard drives and make it in to a file and media server, or use it as a print server. Heck, you could just reinstall what ever version of Windows came on it and use it for web surfing and word processing.
This ignores all the really funky stuff you can do with an old computer, like contributing to a distributed computing network like Folding At Home or SETI At Home. Or trying to build a robot with the laptop as its “brain”. Or poke around on places like instructables.com or makezine.com for projects that require a computer and see what grabs your fancy.
ETA: Spelling
Flyswatter
Doorstop
Writing surface for your lap
Museum exhibit
I’m sure there’s more.
Got it started, Puppy linux sounds interesting, I am still having problems with Ubuntu. The reason I wanted Ubuntu on here was that XP requires an antivirus. Avast pretty much shut it down, every click of a mouse or keystroke took a minute to get thru. I will check into the puppy linux, thanks for the tips. I will look into some of them.
or e-cycle it when your local municipality offers (most do it twice a year if there’s no local facility). A lot of Best Buy’s, Circuit City’s and large electronics/appliances stores (i.e. Abt Electronics in Chicagoland) offer e-cycling for a small fee.
What Boyo Jim said.