Old notebook with new OS?

Forum: Laptops
Topic: Old notebook with new OS?
started by: dayware

Posted by dayware on Feb. 26 2006,08:33

Hi
I´m using an old notebook (Maxdata 5024 Artist running WIN95 / 133MHz / 32MB RAM / 1GB HD) and want to refresh it a little bit. What about using DSL? Would this be reasonable? Or any other idea?
Want to use wordprocessing, spreadsheets, internet, mail.
Thank you for any ideas in advance.

Posted by pr0f3550r on Feb. 26 2006,15:20

Once upon a time I installed a full SUSE onto an older PC than yours and it worked (with KDE!). I don't see why DSL could not work on yours.

Posted by cbagger01 on Feb. 27 2006,05:52

It should work, but you will need to create and then format a linux swap partition because 32MB of RAM is not enough for most programs.

You can even try a "poorman's" install and no need to create new partitions.

Just boot Win95 and copy the 50MB livecd contents over to your C:\ drive. Make sure to use capital letters, IE:

C:\KNOPPIX\KNOPPIX

and then boot DSL on a newer computer and choose Create a boot floppy (standard boot floppy) from the menu.

Then use the newly created boot floppy to give DSL a try.

If you boot up with:

dsl frugal

at the boot prompt, you might even be able to use the menu to CREATE A DOS SWAP FILE on your existing Win95 partition. It might help.

Anyways, good luck.

Posted by dayware on Feb. 27 2006,14:24

Thank you so far.
Unfortunately I hardly know anything about operating systems. Just thought to "clean" the notebook from DOS and WIN95 and install DSL instead. Would this work as well?
If yes, any idea where to get a "How To"?

Posted by cbagger01 on Feb. 27 2006,18:13

It would also work, provided that you can somehow get the liveCD to boot up properly.

The poorman's install method is a safer choice because you do not kill your win95 installation in order to give DSL a tryout.

Posted by muskrat on May 26 2006,04:43

I'm not one to advocate leaving windows on any computor, But with the poormans install and floppy boot, windoze serves one purpose to load the 50 mb file onto the hard drive on older computors that don't boot from CD or have a USB port.

Posted by cbagger01 on May 27 2006,17:53

Yes, it is useful in that regard.

I suppose you could also get MSDOS + your custom CDROM DOS driver file to copy it over but this is harder to do than to simply use the existing (already configured) operating system to do the job.