Going Mobile

[Caluser2000]

As mention in my Hoard thread I received a couple of laptops gratis. Both are early to mid 2000ish Dells, a D610 and an Inspiron 6000. The D610 was acting up according to the PO and did die on me for some reason. Looking on the interweb there was a few threads with that model having some weird and wonderful issues. The 6000 worked fine but a few keys where missing. On close examination the keyboards on both machines appeared to be the same apart from little pointer thingie between the G,H & B keys. Out with a flat bladed screw driver as well as a phillips head screw driver and a swap was made in under 10mins. Removed the 1 gig ram stick from the D610 and fitted it to the 6000, had the hdd at work and all is good.

It's running XP quite well and hooked up to the home wireless no probs. Only my second lappy in all these years. I was expecting more noise from the fan and the battery seems to be good for a few hours a least.

Any I'm very pleased with this off cast and sure Ill put it to good use. Quite comfy sitting on the old sofa reading VCF.

 

[Unknown_K]

The problem with most older laptops is not enough RAM, bad video chipset, and finding working batteries. XP is still usable for browsing but its days are numbered. I have a ton of laptops, but mobile for me is just sitting on the bench in the back yard under the trees enjoying some sun while reading the news. Never was much for mobile computing, heck even when I got my first cell phone in the 90's I kept it in the car. It's just nice to be without electronics when you are away from home or the office.

 

[tingo]

For people not adverse to trying new things, old laptops work nicely with lighter Linux variants, Xubuntu for example. I wish it was the same with my favorite modern operating system, FreeBSD, but it seems more of a hit-and-miss; some old laptops work great, others don't. Perhaps I should try PC-BSD one of these days. It says it supports Xfce and LXDE in addition to Gnome and KDE, with those it should be lightweight.

 

[Doug G]

For people not adverse to trying new things, old laptops work nicely with lighter Linux variants

Or even heavier linux variants. I have an old Dell Inspiron 1200 w/ a Celeron and 1gb ram, it happily dual-boots XP and Fedora 19. It won't win any speed contests but is entirely functional and usable in either OS.

 

[Caluser2000]

I'm not particularly worried about XP not having any support at all as long as it's doing what I want it to do. I've used plenty of other systems/OSs well past there "intended" used-by date. Agreed Linux is a good option I've got at least one system running it. As long as there's life in this beatsy it'll get use. When it goes tits up hardware ies I'll part it out and scap what I don't want.

I hear what you saying about getting away from electronics Unknown_K. It is nice to get away from gizmos all together. I put off having wireless for the longest time but gave in to the good lady and son :0 Still don't have a personal cell phone though and still consider them an annoyance. The cordless phone at work is bad enough.

 

[marrkede]

In my opinion worrying about XP not having any support at all as long as it's doing what I want it to do is in vain. Anyhow I appreciate you for good contribution.