Got an old laptop working.

Kizzume · Posted: Thu Dec 13, 2007 10:43 pm Post subject: Got an old laptop working.

The Mercury Rising, a band I was one of the vocalists and keyboard players of, whom I still get together with occasionally, was needing one of their old laptops to work decently again. It has 32 megs of ram. It's from 1998. Fun stuff.

All they need it to do is play mp3's when they click something. This machine was schmeukey. Every time an explorer window opened, explorer would crash.

Anyway, since I didn't have a win98 disk anymore, I decided to try linux--using some of those live cd's. By the time I finally had a distribution that worked, I had figured out all the problems with the Windows98 that was on the machine already. Besides having 3 AOL's on top of each other, and a number of other improperly uninstalled programs that they had just deleted the folders inside the Program Files folder.

Then there was the corrupted IE update that affects the whole system because explorer IS internet explorer on win98.

Anyway--I finally got everything going. With the help of my brother, I was able to get a program going using a trainer/cheat-maker without actually using any codes--I just used the interface that lets me select a sound instantly when I click a button. Worked out great--once they get a laptop that has more than 32megs, and that's exactly what they'll be getting in a couple weeks, so I'll have a new one to work on, because they're not really "new", they're used and may have a bunch of crap on them too.

Blah blah blah...

That has been my day today. I'm going to go eat now.

Segep · Joined: 10 Nov 2007 Posts: 222

So you put Xubuntu on it? I have an Ubuntu server that doesn't have KDE. Or it does, but I can't figure out how to install it. Right now the whole machine is command line interface only, so it's a 20 pound, rack-mounted boat anchor as far as I'm concerned....

Kizzume · Posted: Fri Dec 14, 2007 9:06 am Post subject:

I eventually got things working under DSL (Damn Small Linux), but had to figure out how to get it to use ALSA instead of OSS for the sound. Eventually I got the Win98 to work correctly on the old thing. Smile