So heres the story. I get a laptop to work on from one of my dads co-workers, and naturally I end up liking it. So, I decided to search Hard Forum's FS section for "old laptops," not expecting to find much. I came across two. One PIII laptop for $225 (maybe a bit steep, eh?) and a PII laptop for $75! I immediately PM'ed the guy with the PII laptop and offered my 80GB External HDD for a trade, and he said yes! So we cross ship, and heres what I got atm.
Gateway Solo 5150
Battery holds a charge, LCD is fairly bright with no dead pixels, etc. So yeah, I'm happy.. for now.
Time to modernize the beast
. The nice thing about this laptop is it has a crap load of features, especially for its age. This will make it easy to upgrade. A few worthwhile features to mention is that it has an integrated IR reciever/sender on the side, which is very cool. I havn't tried it out yet but both my PSP & my Cell Phone have IR receiver/senders too, so maybe I can use it to transfer files with them easily. Another nice feature is that it has two PCIMCIA ports. The only thing it really lacks is onboard LAN, which you'd think it'd have with all of those features right? Nope..
For the upgrade, I plan to get the usual stuff for laptops, being RAM & a Wireless card.I might pick up a small tote case/protector too. Those two sticks of RAM, along with the (on-board
) 32MB SDRAM will give me the maximum 288MB of ram. That is more than enough for AIM, MSN, occasional web browsing, and typing reports for school. XP is actually fairly responsive with 64MB, using one program at a time. The Power LED on the Laptop changes color with CPU load. 0-49% is orange/amber, and 50-100% is green. When loading applications, it's usually amber. That can only mean one thing, the CPU is quite ample. 
Vintage laptops are very fun. FragTek can back me up on this, he has fun with his older powerbook. If you are on a tight budget, look for one of these older laptops. For under $100, they're great. Dump $30-$100 into them and you have a very powerful laptop for basic things such as Internet, E-Mail, and typing Documents.. which is the primary use of laptops anyway.
I hope this inspires you all to do something similar. It's kind of fun for a little side project. Once I'm all done, I'll post a few more pix.
Thanks for looking!
Gateway Solo 5150
- Pentium II 333MHz "Dixon" w/256K L2 Cache
- 64MB Micron PC-66
- 5GB Toshiba HDD
- CD-ROM
- 14" @ 1024x768
- XP Home SP-1 (No Internet, No Updates..)
Battery holds a charge, LCD is fairly bright with no dead pixels, etc. So yeah, I'm happy.. for now.
Time to modernize the beast
. The nice thing about this laptop is it has a crap load of features, especially for its age. This will make it easy to upgrade. A few worthwhile features to mention is that it has an integrated IR reciever/sender on the side, which is very cool. I havn't tried it out yet but both my PSP & my Cell Phone have IR receiver/senders too, so maybe I can use it to transfer files with them easily. Another nice feature is that it has two PCIMCIA ports. The only thing it really lacks is onboard LAN, which you'd think it'd have with all of those features right? Nope..For the upgrade, I plan to get the usual stuff for laptops, being RAM & a Wireless card.I might pick up a small tote case/protector too. Those two sticks of RAM, along with the (on-board
) 32MB SDRAM will give me the maximum 288MB of ram. That is more than enough for AIM, MSN, occasional web browsing, and typing reports for school. XP is actually fairly responsive with 64MB, using one program at a time. The Power LED on the Laptop changes color with CPU load. 0-49% is orange/amber, and 50-100% is green. When loading applications, it's usually amber. That can only mean one thing, the CPU is quite ample. Vintage laptops are very fun. FragTek can back me up on this, he has fun with his older powerbook. If you are on a tight budget, look for one of these older laptops. For under $100, they're great. Dump $30-$100 into them and you have a very powerful laptop for basic things such as Internet, E-Mail, and typing Documents.. which is the primary use of laptops anyway.
I hope this inspires you all to do something similar. It's kind of fun for a little side project. Once I'm all done, I'll post a few more pix.
Thanks for looking!
