old laptop niggles

[EddyH]

Right, I have this old p120 laptop. It's pretty decent all told, even the battery will run a couple hours! (longer, now i've clocked it down to 75mhz)

If only it didnt have a 640x480 screen (smaller even than the 800x600 on the p100 mum used to have)... oh well...... ahem

I need to pick some brains of the more experienced techie gurus on here over a couple issues, namely....

1. Is it at all likely this machine will have a Cardbus PCMCIA slot, or is it strictly 16 bit at this speed / age? (it's got a "designed for windows 95" sticker on it..... laughable as it has 16mb onboard, and the previous user has very wisely installed win3.1 instead!) ..... I'd really like to give it USB functionality, if i manage to give it the ability to run 98-lite. It would make data transfer SO much easier, as my only option right now is to use floppies, or get a parallel zip / cd burner off ebay (well ok, it's got a network card, but that's no good if i need to transfer a more-than-1.4mb file from work, as it only works at home).. Plus i have, or will have when it comes back from repairs, a 20gb HD/mp3 player doohickey (discontinued "N-Pod", £128.... BARGAIN), which pretty much solves all storage problems in one small package.

2. What kind of memory would such a thing take, and roughly how much? I know it varies from machine to machine but i just need ballpark. I know that any upgrade for it is going to be an eBay job

corrolaries to that are
a/ what size hard disc could i cram inside? it's got an 850mb currently which is not quite good enough; i have a 2gb and maybe a 3.2gb laptop drive sitting around somewhere.

b/ would a FlashPath adaptor (also ebayed i suppose) be a worthwhile purchase? I've got a 64mb smartmedia card i could use with it, amongst other sizes.

Thanks

[Soopafresh]

Dude, you're trying to turn a Pinto into a Porsche, and all you're going to end up with is a weird looking Pinto. Install Linux (Linspire is Windows-Like) and leave it at that.

[ozymango]

1. Is it at all likely this machine will have a Cardbus PCMCIA slot, or is it strictly 16 bit at this speed / age?

Sorry, man -- never seen a P1 laptop with a Carbus slot, and you can't run USB without a 32-bit slot (Cardbus).

As for memory, I've run 98se on a P-75 with 64megs of RAM and it wasn't too painful ... ... but you'd probably pay as much for extra RAM for this puppy on eBay as you would for a P1 laptop with more RAM already installed (for a while I used to pick up Compaq laptops for parts for my wife's old computer and think I got the last one, P75-64megs RAM-1gb hard drive for $25!).

You could probably easily put a 2 or 3.5 gb drive inside, though, a I've used a little PCMCIA card SmartMedia adaptor with great success -- we actually used this laptop as a storage device for digital photos when we went overseas a few years ago; we couldn't afford any more SmartMedia cards for the camera, have a 3gb drive in the laptop, it has a 120-220v power supply, and I picked up the flash adaptor for about ten bucks on eBay. Worked great for downloading and saving photos!

If you get a flashpath adaptor (16-bit PCMCIA) for the laptop, you could then get (if you don't already have) a flash card reader for your office computer, and move files that way (office PC to flash card, flash card to laptop), for whatever nefarious purposes you have in mind. Also you say you have a network card and can't use it at work? One thing we've found this laptop actually very useful for -- as a "terminal client" for my wife's main computer, which runs XP.

I've enabled remote desktop on her "main" computer, and she then uses the laptop in the kitchen (I've got network jacks all over the house!) to remote in to her main computer; we've got lotsa sun in the kitchen and none in the computer room so it's nicer for her to work from out there.

Also they do make wireless 16-bit PCMCIA network adaptors so you could maybe set something up that way ...

Well, hope that helps. Good luck!