An interesting debate starter and trip down memory lane
 

Ok here goes, I have come across a bit of a challenge today. A friend handed me her "elder" laptop and said ressurect this!!!
It's a HP Pavilion notebook model N3350, that is actually still running win98se, specs as follows.
11/11/99 build
Insyde BIOS ver DI.M1.12
550 Mhz AMD K6II+
65 Mb RAM
5.0 Gb HDD
Trident CyberBlade i7 AGP shared memory (UMA) 800x600 max res
DVD-ROM
Which would be the best distro to use on this old beast?

I would start with a Knoppix DVD, boot that up (see if it does), then note what drivers it installed.

I would recycle it properly and get a better computer. Here's an excellent article on how to find used hardware free/low-cost:

http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/10...-old-computer/

In 2013 you should be looking for at least 1ghz processor and 1gb RAM, in my opinion. (Although even that will only have a couple years' life left in it.) Most people carry such a computer around in their pockets, in the form of a smartphone. An iPhone has equivalent RAM as sixteen of your HP Pavillions!

We were discussing this a bit in another thread, here:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...pc-4175449680/

There are some good ideas and links there. I'd suggest, if you want Linux, to start with TinyCore, Slitaz (make sure to use the LoRam version), or Puppy Wary.

With 65MB, the problem is not finding a distro, but finding the software. AntiX would be fine, but when it came to using the internet you'd be stuck with Dillo, which would fail on many sites. Puppy is larger than AntiX.

Oh, heck... I had a similar Win95-equipped laptop, and made it do amazing things under a stripped-down Gentoo distribution, and, even though "Old Dobbin's" video don't work so well anymore ... :cry: ... "by gawd, I still remote into it and use it as a render-farm server." (Why the heck not? I'm a nerd, ain't I?)

Well I had assumed the worst for it anyway being the dino it actually is so I Will donate it to the recycle bin and be done. I thank everyone for the advice and comments