Can I still use P1 laptop Toshiba530CDT for internet ?

gdts · 01-26-2010, 06:10 AM

I have an old Toshiba Tecra P1 166 MHz laptop with a 94 MB ram and 8 gb HDD. When I bought this machine it had only 2 GB HDD and 64 MB ram with a Win-95 pre-installed.
I changed the HDD and installed Windows-Millenium as the machine has a USB port which was not recognised by Win95. The machine worked well for few years and then the windows was no longer supported, and with anti-virus, the machine went too slow. I installed Rambooster and it worked for some time.
I still feel it is a good machine and may run well with an OS that occupies less ram space. Will someone please guide me appropriately ?
Is there an external ram that can be plugged into the usb port ?

linus72 · 01-26-2010, 06:19 AM

Welcome to LQ gdts!

Well, before guiding you on what Linux to put on there;
we would need to know your Linux experience?
have you used any distro's or no?

theYinYeti · 01-26-2010, 06:30 AM

I would advise you to try DamnSmallLinux. It did wonders for my “nomade” laptop (see signature).

Yves.

gdts · 01-26-2010, 07:58 AM

Hi, I have no experience on linux

Quote:

Originally Posted by linus72

Welcome to LQ gdts!

Well, before guiding you on what Linux to put on there;
we would need to know your Linux experience?
have you used any distro's or no?

damgar · 01-26-2010, 08:06 AM

As a rule of thumb I would suggest that you consider either using an older distro or a minimal install of a newer install with a lightweight gui (assuming you want a gui) for the best performance with those specs. XFCE always reminds me of windows 98/ME so might be both familiar and beneficial to you.

http://distrowatch.com/ is a very good place to check out the various options.

frankbell · 01-26-2010, 06:59 PM

I am running a full install of Slackware 12.2 quite well on an old IBM PC300 (Pentium 1 300 MHz Desktop--not laptop). Other than being a little slow, the only other problem I've noticed it that the Pentium I chip can't handle video. It does audio just fine.

Actually, it wasn't slow compared to my P3 XP box. It was just slow compared to other Linux boxes.

Right now, I'm using the box as a file server, but I used to use it as a webserver and ran a Wordpress blog off it for several years, until the database just got too big for the box to handle.

I suspect the laptop will run fine for internet access, except possibly for videos.

You might consider trying out some Live CDs first (remembering that any OS running off a CD drive is going to be slower than one running off the HDD just because of the seek time).