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Jan 5th, 2025, 1:46am
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Topic: My new (old) noteboook... (Read 403 times) |
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ReeBop
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 Arlington TX
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1fw Messenger: reebop@imchat.h opto.org
   
  
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My new (old) noteboook...
« on: May 10th, 2005, 5:54am » |
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Think of it as a reclamation project. I was given a disused Toshiba Portege CT610. Most people would not bother, but after reading the history of the machine, it looked like a great lightweight computer to take around. It has a 8 inch by 10 inch footprint. The computer also came with 2 Lithium Ion batteries capable of 2-3 hours of use per battery. Being a 10 year old machine, it's a Pentium 90, with a 800 meg harddrive, 40 megs of ram and a small, yet attractive active matrix screen capable of 640x480 resolution with 16k colors. What could I do to make this a usable Internet machine?
First thing was to upgrade the Windows 95 to Windows 98 SE. Many programs won't work right with Windows 95, so, the decision was an easy one to make. I also loaded the "unofficial" service pack that updated Windows 98 SE with all the important security updates.
Being limited in harddrive space and memory, I downloaded the free version of 98Lite to remove Internet Explorer. That freed up 40 megs of space. I loaded Opera 8.0, a great, low resource web browser that can act also as a mail client and IRC chat client. To do Yahoo Chat, I loaded YahElite. For my 1freeworld IM service needs, I loaded PSI. AntiVir and Spybot rounded out my toolkit.
The machine had Office 97 already loaded, so I kept that for any wordprocessing and spreadsheet needs in a pinch. The only tasks left to load is Flash and Java support.
Now to the hardware side, I used a PCMCIA network card to connect up and download software. I also used the network to load up the Windows 98 SE, because there is no CDROM drive with this machine. I am limited in cards, because it can only use the older 16 bit cards. There is no USB. I run a wireless network at home, so I picked up a old 802.11b wireless card. At 11Mps, it will do the job fine.
With just a little more tuning, the computer will be great. With it's small (8"X10") footprint, extra long battery life (2-3 hours with each of the 2 batteries given with the machine), I now have a great little machine to carry around home as well as take anywhere free wireless Interent is available.
The important thing to think about is that you can take any older machine, with similar specifications and do what I did with this. No reason to think that an older machine sitting disused can't be used for lightweight Internet access.
In fact, I typed up all this on that system...
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