User Feedback :: CF frugal on an old laptop

Nothing big or profound to report here, just having a great time typing this on an old Toshiba Satellite running DSL:

Satellite 2210CDT
500MHz Celeron
192MB RAM (maxed out)
Octopus (TwinMOS) 802.11b PC WIFI card
DSL 3.4, frugal install to 1GB CF card via a HD-CF adapter

The display's only 800x600, but otherwise this is a pleasure to use. It runs quite cool, but it's still quite fast and SILENT. (I don't think this model has a fan - if it does, it's either not working or it's been cool enough to not need it.)

The only hard part was finding a WIFI driver that would work - the NETR8010.INF on the card's CD apparently doesn't work with ndiswrapper, but some Googling located a NET8010.INF that works great. Everything else was easy.

So, again, nothing that big. Just another really good DSL experience. Thanks, as always, to John, Robert and eveyone who contributes!

I did something very similar with an old Sony VAIO Z505SX. Its really tiny with a 12" screen. The notebook is only a 366 MHz PII, it can't boot via USB, and has no floppy or Optical drive. So, to get DSL on to it I had to disassemble the little thing and do a frugal install on the drive from another machine. Fortunately there were some good instructions on the web. If it had a bit more ram I'd go with a compact flash IDE setup, but with only 128MB I kept the HD so I could have a swap partition.

Its now my living room computer, and serving me fine. Not bad for someone else's trash.

yes, silent is beautiful. ;)

original here.