I bought three old laptops for a few bucks each the other day. They’re Gateway Solo 2100’s: 150 MHz, 72 MB RAM, 1.3 GB HD. No floppies, but each one has a CD drive. I also got a LAN/modem card for each one. The drives are scrubbed, but each one came with either Win95 or NT. I also have a complete install disk for Win98SE for a PC that bit the dust several years ago, as well as a couple different flavors of Linux and, I think, a copy of FreeBSD somewhere around here.
The question is, what do I do with them? I’ve been trying to install Mandrake Linux 8.2 on one of them, because it’s the first thing I found in the desk drawer. It’s slow going, though, and I think Mandrake’s lowest requirements are greater than the equipment can support. OTOH, I did manage to get it to install, but it won’t do anything. Suggested flavors and versions of Linux? Stick w/Winders? Make boat anchors out of them?
I want something I can write on, and possibly play a few simple games (solitaire, most likely). Nothing fancy.
They should handle Red Hat Valhalla(7.3?); I put that on a p100Mhz I’ve got sitting around and it was a little too much- with your laptops’ RAM&speed it should work fine.
You have lots of choices. I’ve actually gotten windows 2000 to run on a similar laptop, though disk drive space is really at a premium. I had to take out help files to get the software I wanted to run to fit. I couldn’t get sound card drivers that worked, but I don’t use sound on it so I didn’t care.
Win98 should do what you want, though it may take a while to track down all the right drivers. Gateway tends to have decent support, so I’d be surprised if you couldn’t get all of the drivers from their web site.
Whenever I’m installing linux and I’m crunched for space, I usually install slackware linux. It’s not the easiest version of linux to install, but it’s relatively easy to pick and choose what you want so that it will fit in the space you have. If you go to www.linux.org and look at all of the distributions you can find some that are small enough to fit on a floppy. You’ll probably want to go up a bit from that and get something with xwindows, but the point is there are plenty of distributions that are designed to fit in a small footprint.
There is an organization, “Tenn. Access To Technology” that sets up used computers for handicaped users.
They will accept any and all usable/repairable hardware and program materials.
There may be a simmilar organization near you that does essentially the same thing.
I got a couple of Micron Gobook2’s from my office (one works fine, the other has a cracked LCD but the computer works)
They are 300mhz, 64mg ram, 4 gig drive.
I installed Win98se on one of them. I picked up a wireless card and am currently sitting on my couch with it surfing the internet and making a post on SDMB. The thing works fine for general surfing, emailing, etc.
If you’re just looking for really general stuff, I don’t see why Win95 wouldn’t handle what you need. I think it would be much easier to get drivers for WIn95 then for Linux. I could be wrong though.
Your cause is valiant, and I sympathize having dealt with lots and lots of old, but still functional, hardware over the years, but they are simply too old to be truly useful for net based stuff, or even for education at this point. They are doorstop curiosities possibly suitable as dedicated Win 95 word processors, serial input data collection devices, or linux toys at best.
I got a whole dual CD Win 95 MS Professional Office Suite + Bookshelf + key in absolutely pristine shape for a dollar at a thrift the other day, so you should be able to get software inexpensively.
My brother wants one w/Win98 installed, so there’s one down, if I can get it to actually boot off the CD. Turns out I don’t have the Win 95 CD’s, even though I’d swear I saw at least one in the bundle of disks & documentation they gave me. Of course, I do have three restore CD’s, which I’m fairly sure have Win95, so I can install that, then install Win 98. Have to do it that way, since the laptop I picked for Win98 doesn’t see the CD, even after going into BIOS & telling it to boot from CD. Oh, well, I’ve got two more I can try.
Trying to install Linux on another - Mandrake 8.2 is right out. Takes days (literally - took me 3 days to go through the package list & pick the packages I wanted) and still won’t load - I got nothing but “error with this package” and “error with that package”. And the display looks like crap, warmed over.
I’ve been browsing the minimal distros on www.linux.org, but most of them are too minimal. Runs off a floppie? Great, but I don’t have a floppy. I’m going to try Slax and Knoppix - they’re both live CD’s, so hopefully it’ll work.
With my Micron I had to format the drives and do a fresh install. The problem was it didn’t have a CD drive, just floppy and USB port. I have a adapter for converting laptop size hard drives to regular size IDE. I pulled the laptop drive out, put it in another computer, formated and installed windows.
Once that was done I collected up the drivers to get the video, wireless network card, software for a little USB jump drive, a copy of Opera and the contents of the Win98 directory on the Windows 98 install CD (the cab files). I transfered those to a directory in the laptop drive. I put that drive back in the laptop and booted it up.
I went pretty smooth.
To get the sound card and various other drivers I either downloaded them from the web or emailed them to my yahoo email account and opened them in Opera on the laptop. I also used the USB drive to transfer software (just copied the contents of the install CD to the jump drive and installed from there).
