CF frugal on an old laptop

Forum: User Feedback
Topic: CF frugal on an old laptop
started by: dslfool

Posted by dslfool on July 31 2007,03:34

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!

Posted by John on Aug. 01 2007,18:53

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.

Posted by humpty on Aug. 01 2007,20:27

yes, silent is beautiful. ;)