using old semi-borked laptop as a thin client
 

I have an ancient WinNote laptop: dx4-75, 8mB ram 512mB HDD with a 2xCD-rom under the keyboard (also not working, and not bootable) and unable to boot from hard drive. I think the IDE controller is fried but it could be some old virus that mucked up the MBR.

Will boot happily from floppy, I have used DOS, Tomsrb etc to get to a CLI on this thing and tried many partition tools etc.

My laptop has no NIC or modem but it does have pcmcia card slots and the usual serial and parallel ports.

My question is should I just sell it for spare parts or can I do something useful with it.

It once ran Win95 happily, I even used to play Doom on it and it is breaking my heart to just toss it.

I now have a xDSL connection so the serial port on my main box is freed up and I am wondering if it could be set up as a thin client for mrs chefmark.


Thanks for any/all ideas on this,

mark

With 8MB of ram it might just run an X server if you're lucky... One of the 3.x series that is; the 4.x.0 versions require much more memory. You could make it get its root filesystem over NFS (using main box as the NFS server) if the hard disk is unusable or too small.

good luck!
nukkel