My "newest" toy is Christina's college laptop (circa 2000). It's a Hewlett Packard Pavillion N3310 that can't hold a charge on its battery...making it as mobile as your extension cords. By today's standards, it's quite heavy (over 7 lbs), especially when you consider the native screen resolution is 800 x 600 pixels. The installed RAM is laughable: 64 MB. Since there's no dedicated graphics memory, 8 MB is currently allocated to that, leaving 56 MB of system memory to play with. The interwebs tell me this bad boy can handle a maximum of 512 MB, so I ordered two 256 MB SDRAM (the old kind you can't buy at Fry's anymore). They should arrive soon...and when they do I plan to pop them in and have some fun with a new OS. It runs Windows 98 on it now; what should I install on it? Any suggestions?
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
I ♥ 10+ year-old computers
I'm now in possession of two, count 'em two personal computers that have 10+ years on them. The first is a Gateway desktop tower I've had since, well, the 90s when it was a shared family computer. It's still running on more or less the same hardware (network card thrown in sometime in college, RAM upgrades along the way), and in 2006 I ditched the then-outdated Windows 98 for Ubuntu (Xubuntu specifically). That thing got me through a lot, man. Lots of homework, term papers, and burnt CDs. It now runs Puppy 5.x and is still a fully-functional machine with modern software. Amazing, no?
My "newest" toy is Christina's college laptop (circa 2000). It's a Hewlett Packard Pavillion N3310 that can't hold a charge on its battery...making it as mobile as your extension cords. By today's standards, it's quite heavy (over 7 lbs), especially when you consider the native screen resolution is 800 x 600 pixels. The installed RAM is laughable: 64 MB. Since there's no dedicated graphics memory, 8 MB is currently allocated to that, leaving 56 MB of system memory to play with. The interwebs tell me this bad boy can handle a maximum of 512 MB, so I ordered two 256 MB SDRAM (the old kind you can't buy at Fry's anymore). They should arrive soon...and when they do I plan to pop them in and have some fun with a new OS. It runs Windows 98 on it now; what should I install on it? Any suggestions?
My "newest" toy is Christina's college laptop (circa 2000). It's a Hewlett Packard Pavillion N3310 that can't hold a charge on its battery...making it as mobile as your extension cords. By today's standards, it's quite heavy (over 7 lbs), especially when you consider the native screen resolution is 800 x 600 pixels. The installed RAM is laughable: 64 MB. Since there's no dedicated graphics memory, 8 MB is currently allocated to that, leaving 56 MB of system memory to play with. The interwebs tell me this bad boy can handle a maximum of 512 MB, so I ordered two 256 MB SDRAM (the old kind you can't buy at Fry's anymore). They should arrive soon...and when they do I plan to pop them in and have some fun with a new OS. It runs Windows 98 on it now; what should I install on it? Any suggestions?
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2 comments (I comment back!):
SliTaz
OMG I just jizzed in my pants when I read that. My fiancee not only can name a GNU/Linux distro, but one that is actually very appropriate for the project! And my fiancee is a chick, too! Granted, I did mention SliTaz in a previous post, but still. Way to go, babe! I think I will go with SliTaz!
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