Using an Old Computer

I'm sure I'm not alone in having an old computer that's outlived it's useful life in the mainstream, but nonetheless is still working. There are a lot of options with these computers, you could give it to charity or a recycling centre for instance. But in either case I recommend you ensure that any private data on the disks is deleted first!

I have an old Sony Vaio laptop, there's nothing wrong with it except that it's only got a 200MHz Pentium processor, 64Mb RAM and a 4Gb hard disk. Being nearly 10 years old it also had an ancient version of Windows 98 on it (the first version not the slightly newer SE version). It's so old it pre-dates WiFi and that was a big part of the problem since there's no reason why even a relatively poorly specified machine such as this couldn't be used as a web browser, but these days you don't want to be tied to a wire when you've got a small laptop, mobility is the whole point!

Upgrading from Windows 98 to Windows XP was out of the question and you can't get hold of earlier versions so I forgot about Windows and did what any other techie would do looked at Linux. There is a bewildering array of Linux distributions to choose from, but at least my critieria (i.e. the machine spec) limits the number that I've got to choose from as only a 'lite' version would run on this specification of machine.

The first distribution I looked at was FluxBuntu. It's a 'lite' version of the increasingly popular Ubuntu. At first I was impressed, it installed onto the laptop without incident and recognised my USB WiFi adapter and allowed me out onto the internet (OK there was a little fiddling but it was surprisingly painless). But that's where the pain started, I know it's not really the distributions fault but it was incredibly slow (a common comment on some of the forums), and nor did I like the bundled web browser.

So I've decided to try another distribution, there are several others to try and I shall report my success or failure in a future post!