This is a laptop from 2000. IIRC, it ran Windows 98 and XP (32 bit). It has an 8G HD, and, quite frankly I have no idea if it still works at all, since it hasn't been fired up in three or four years. It might need a new CMOS battery, or it might not. In the past, I've taken it apart numerous times to replace screens, etc.

Would it be worth my while to try and install a very basic Linux (like Puppy Linux) or should I just put it in a recycle bin? My inclination is to make it useable if at all possible. I do know that larger HDDs are no longer available, nor are cards. I think it has a Wi-Fi card or something similar, but that would be at least ten years old and probably no longer works.

My time is not valuable, but my psyche is, and I'm wondering if the frustration of failure would be far more likely than the exhilaration of getting it up and running.

Hi:

You'll probably have to go into the BIOS and set the boot priority to the CDROM drive.

The requirements for Puppy is a 333 MHz processor and 256 m of RAM.

http://puppylinux.com/

As far as the frustration of failure being more likely than the exhilaration of getting it up and running is concerned; the only way you'll know that is to try it and see if the Puppy Linux CD boots up.

Tiny Core Linux, SliTaz Linux, maybe worth a look, you may need to fiddle them to get them running though. Possibly a BSD, but there are a couple of assembler distros that run from floppy, so you may be able to install one of them, MenuetOS, & KolibriOS.

https://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/
http://www.slitaz.org/en/
http://menuetos.net/
http://www.kolibrios.org/en/

A 600X is a Pentium III based laptop which could have 64 - 576 MB of memory. Knowing how much memory would help us select something that might work reasonably well.

The 600X does not have a builtin wireless or Ethernet port unless you purchased a PCMCIA card which might add additional limitations as to what distributions have cardbus support. You could use a serial port connection to another computer to connect online but depending on how much time you want to invest in playing with the laptop might not be worth the effort.

Well some-one was able to use it
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Instal..._ThinkPad_600X
but that's with the full memory upgrade and several years ago. You could try AntiX, but you'll still be short of an internet connection unless a card was added at some stage. At least the live AntiX will enable you to find out its capacities.

I had an older model and ran linux and BeOS on it so I'd think you could play with it at least.

I ran zipslack on it too and DOS with MKStoolkit.