Old laptops and WiFi

[vwestlife]

If you're looking for an older laptop that can play MP3s and get on the Internet, I would recommend at least an early Pentium. I have a Toshiba Satellite Pro 410 laptop with a Pentium-90, maxed out to 40 MB RAM, and it does everything I could ask a Windows 98SE computer to do. Its ESS-688 audio sounds good and even works in DOS (MPXPLAY is my favorite). With its original 4X CD-ROM drive, it has just enough CPU power to play Video CDs and MPEG-1 video in real-time at "full motion" quality. I have a PCMCIA Ethernet card for it, but a 16-bit (non-CardBus) wireless card would work as well.

The shadowy, ghosty "dual-scan" passive matrix color LCD isn't that great to look at, but Toshiba also had models with active-matrix LCDs if you can find one. My favorite part is that the AC adapter is built in; all you need is a plain power cord to plug it right into a wall outlet!

If I had to go for a 486 laptop, though, it would definitely be an IBM ThinkPad 701C, with the "butterfly" keyboard. The highest original spec for it was a 486DX/4-75, which isn't too bad and can still be quite useful with appropriate software.

 

[squirrel-steam]

that is the most atrochious keyboard on a laptop i have ever seen!

 

[vwestlife]

that is the most atrochious keyboard on a laptop i have ever seen!

That's only because it's open. When you close the lid, the "butterfly" keyboard folds up so that it doesn't stick out. It was IBM's way of getting a full-sized keyboard on a small notebook computer.

Photo of the keyboard halfway folded:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...5.JPG/787px-IBM_ThinkPad_701_Butterfly_05.JPG

 

[Trixter]

The Butterfly laptops were a way to get a full-size keyboard on a miniature laptop. In my opinion, the design was simply brilliant (you need to see it open and close to understand).

In very ironic turn of events, my trusty IBM T40 of 4+ years died last night with some sort of motherboard problem :-(

 

[Druid6900]

Druid, tell me more about your laptop, even if it's PM'd to me. I can't remember if the 520 has pcmcia slots and it's buried so I can't really get to it. Did you use it wirelessly?

Here's the techspecs;

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=112331

and, no, I'm not running it wirelessly at the moment.

 

[vwestlife]

In very ironic turn of events, my trusty IBM T40 of 4+ years died last night with some sort of motherboard problem :-(

All of my laptop problems have always been due to hard drives. Either I have bad luck or those 2.5" laptop hard drives, no matter what brand, just don't last. IBM, Toshiba, Fujitsu... they've all gone bad on me, either due to accumulating bad sectors, stiction preventing the drive from spinning up unless it's slapped around, or a total head crash (some even use the drive's voice coil to make "police siren" and "bomb dropping" noises if the drive has crashed or has stiction -- which will really freak you out the first time you hear it!).

And if you look up the definition of "slow" in the dictionary, you'll find a picture of my ThinkPad 560 running Windows XP Pro -- on a P166MMX with 80 MB of RAM!

 

[Trixter]

All of my laptop problems have always been due to hard drives.

Mine have been motherboard problems, which is what happened to the T40. Hard drive is fine (I got my data off of it last night).

 

[crushinaa]

I am a bit thick when it comes to games consoles but my kids love them but i need help! what is a wi-fi??? i think its to do with a ds am i right? do i need to have it and what does it do/is it for?? i no some clever people are probhelp laughing at me but am new to this whole games thing.