Questions about bring back life to an old laptop
 

So I have my hands on this really old laptop and am trying to way whether it will be worth the effort or not. It doesn't have a Ethernet port, but I'm assuming a modern usb wireless adapter would do the trick. It have 64MB of ram, 5GB hdd and some ancient AMD processor. Oh and it does have two PCMIA ports. Right now it has Windows ME on it (haha) and I think I'll go with Vector or Puppy.

I guess the main question is will be an option?

Thanks for your time.

Hi,

I would check out some LiveCD from 'The LiveCD List' to check out your hardware and needs.

This link and others are available from 'Slackware-Links'. More than just Slackware® links!

You can also try DSL.

It's doable, but you really should have more RAM because for example starting any recent web browser is a pain with 64MB of RAM, no matter what a slim GUI you're using. If you are only going to use command line, you're absolutely fine.

Even with Puppy?

I just fired up my old Thinkpad (350 MHz, 64MB) do some testing.

It runs Slackware 11.0 (2.4 kernel).

free gives me (+/- buffers/cache):

51MB free - after booting to runlevel 3, no swapping
45MB free - after starting fluxbox via startx (=without a login manager), no swapping
29MB free - after starting firefox 2.0 with google open, no swapping

After opening two more tabs and opening linuxquestions and the german facebook-lookalike, it's at

23MB free, but 6MB of swap space used already. (Let's not talk about free now ;))

Starting firefox took roughly about 30 seconds, by the way, and that's 2.something. Imagine starting some decent music player app like amarok now... And you really don't want to try youtube on that machine for sure.

I have never tried puppy. I can't imagine it performing much better though.