A Dell Latitude, some advice.

Tarts · 10-09-2003, 09:05 PM

Hello!

My neighboor has givin me the option to buy a pentium 3 Dell Latitude for $200.00. A couple of thing's I noticed, one it need's a new CDROM, the one in now has a loose "disk spinner". I don't know if this is bad but the hard drive make's noise when it "think's". So my question's are:

It has fedora Linux installed, is there any horror story's with slackware and this particular type of machine?

Am i getting a good deal?

Thank's, Tarts.

finegan · 10-09-2003, 10:51 PM

Yeah that's a good deal, if the cdrom is indeed toast you can pick up one as parts off of flea bay for about $30, if the machine grinds a lot when its running it just probably has a small amount of RAM, and seeing as Fedora is RH, you're probably running KDE or Gnome, which means that you're probably swapping a lot. PC100 SODIMMs for that era run about $40 for 128Mb, so if its living off of 128, or worse... 64, just double the ram.

Latitudes are incredibly generic parts, usually all ATI or Nividia (no annoying Trident cyberblades), normal sound cards, USB, etc... its probably a generic as dirt Intel 440 series board running one of the middle to early coppermine mobiles, so... anywhere from 500Mhz to about... 800?

Yeah, if you don't buy it, I probably would, what's his email address?

Cheers,

Finegan

Tarts · 10-09-2003, 11:00 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by finegan
Yeah that's a good deal, if the cdrom is indeed toast you can pick up one as parts off of flea bay for about $30, if the machine grinds a lot when its running it just probably has a small amount of RAM, and seeing as Fedora is RH, you're probably running KDE or Gnome, which means that you're probably swapping a lot. PC100 SODIMMs for that era run about $40 for 128Mb, so if its living off of 128, or worse... 64, just double the ram.
Latitudes are incredibly generic parts, usually all ATI or Nividia (no annoying Trident cyberblades), normal sound cards, USB, etc... its probably a generic as dirt Intel 440 series board running one of the middle to early coppermine mobiles, so... anywhere from 500Mhz to about... 800?

Yeah, if you don't buy it, I probably would, what's his email address?

Cheers,

Finegan

Oh yea, gotta hate those Trident's.

500Mhz of processing power, a minimilistic slackware install should do her good!

Then a new CDRW/DVD drive...hard drive...

Thank's finegan.

trickykid · 10-09-2003, 11:18 PM

I'd have to agree with Fin really. If you browse eBay, some jokers are buying 233mhz laptops for more than $200 bucks. So a PIII for $200 I think is a great deal. I recently got a laptop for free from my mother, only had to replace the LCD screen which I found one in mint condition for $50 and local, just went and picked it up. CDROM drive was making noises when spinning, just had to take it out and rebend part of the aluminum frame so the cd's wouldn't rub when it was spinning...

Good luck with your new laptop....

finegan · 10-10-2003, 02:33 AM

I still do just about everything on either on either:

Morphy: K6-2 500Mhz 128Mb ram Compaq Presario, Slack 9.1... usually KDE or fluxbox

or

Nimble: P3 500Mhz 128Mb ram IBM Thinkpad, Gentoo 1.4... fluxbox

They're both far fast enough for anything I ever feel like doing.

I've had both of them with their guts spilled out on my coffee table before. I'm not an electrician by any means, I had to borrow a friend for the 5 minutes of soldering that needed to be done... after the 5-10 hours of painstakingly careful disassembly.

Cheers,

Finegan

Tarts · 10-10-2003, 08:31 AM

Thank's for the reply's all. After spending a blissfull night with it, she's mine...all mine.

*rip's out fedora*

Tarts.