Computers at drugstores...what's next?

[wolfie]

i could see those being good for typing some light web surfing and that is about it. the price is a bit high in my opinion.

i just got a free thinkpad T23 dumped on me. i just had a slap a hard drive in it. it's the 1.13 GHz Pentium 3 Mobile. 384 MB of RAM, and i love it. just to see what would happen, i put Windows 7 on it, and it handles it just fine. if you disable cleartext and all the other worthless GUI junk, it runs similarly to XP.

i wish someone would drop me off a free laptop. mine die over 3 months ago and i just ordered an external hard disk case for the 160GB drive i had in it. windows 7 will run on a lot less. i had windows 7 run on a P2 400MHz with 766 MB of ram. it ran ok considering it had a bunch of generic and missing drivers.

 

[Unknown_K]

i just got a free thinkpad T23 dumped on me. i just had a slap a hard drive in it. it's the 1.13 GHz Pentium 3 Mobile. 384 MB of RAM, and i love it. just to see what would happen, i put Windows 7 on it, and it handles it just fine. if you disable cleartext and all the other worthless GUI junk, it runs similarly to XP.

T23s can use cheap high density PC133 SODIMM for a max of 1GB of RAM (2x512MB), so you might want to get the mac for Windows 7. I have 512MB in mine and run XP.

 

[Tupin]

Well, looks like they are gone from CVSes, they aren't in their sale ads anymore.

Looks like I'll have to find one from somewhere else...

 

[Chuck(G)]

Try eBay--they're cheaper there.

 

[Tupin]

Just got one from CVS- first impressions are good, but I cannot connect to the web wirelessly. I click the Wifi power button, and when the icon shows up in the bottom right and it's clicked, it closes right away. Help?

 

[Tupin]

Ah, turns out it was broken. Got a new one, this one works.

 

[saundby]

Echoes of 1998

Echoes of 1998

I went to a CMOS IC design conference in 1998 and made some notes:

-linear scaling ends in 2008-2010 timeframe, chips go aggressively multiprocessor on single die unless 3D packaging is sorted out.
-price/performance scaling projected out to 2010 has us buying, by my back of envelope calcs based on keynote, 1-2ghz risc computers with 1-2gb ram & 40+gb of storage in a bubble pack at the drug store for <$100. Primary use will be light/casual entertainment on a computer with the power of a present-day application or file server. Unit will likely be disposable, with all main components on a sigle board.
-it'll be cheaper to throw more threads/cores at a problem than speed up processing unless there's a breakthrough. post 2010 parallelism will rule unless 3d gets cheaper than foreseen.