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Monday May 19, 2008

Laptop Shuffle

Last week, my wife got a new MacBook (maxed out at 4GB memory and 250 GB of disk). A really nice computer. Duncan now gets her old iBook (768 MB memory and 60 GB of disk), and I get his old HP pavillion xt125 (256 MB memory and 20 GB of disk).

I don't plan to use it as my main laptop (I have a Powerbook for that), but I thought I'd set it up as a spare laptop that can be used around the house.

I thought about putting OpenSolaris 2008.05 on it, but the system requirements say you need a minimum of 512 MB of memory. Ouch.

I looked at Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (a.k.a. Hardy), but the recommended minimum requirements is for 384 MB of memory (although it does say the bare minimum is 64 MB, but "it is unlikely that the system would run well").

I burned the latest live CD for Damn Small Linux, all 50MB's of it, and there is no doubt that this boots fast and runs well, but most of the graphics look so 1980's, and it's unclear that the hacked on version of Firefox would be able to cope with some of the latest Web 2.0-centric web sites. Not for me.

I used the Kingston Memory Searcher to see if I could find some memory for it, but it doesn't know anything about this machine.

So I just put Windows XP back on it, from the initial set of CD's that HP supplied with the laptop. All 7 of them. I took off all the crap that they insist on installing, and loaded up essentials like the latest Firefox, iTunes, Quicktime and Acroread.

It started doing it's Windows updates. I had a quiet chuckle on one of the Security Updates ("Installing 1 of 92").

So I have a nice old clunky laptop that can be used to browse the web, play music, read eBooks etc. It's also one I don't mind taking in the garage and using to display build instructions (such as these), the next time I want to put something together.

But it's clear that the days are numbered for laptops such as these.

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