[GLLUG] Re: Preparing an Old Laptop

Charles Tower c.e.tower at gmail.com
Fri Jan 26 21:28:34 EST 2007


Yeah, I was surprised Win2000Pro could fit on a 2GB disk, let alone MS 
Office XP.  Of course, never having used either, I am no expert on them. 
  Perhaps there's some kind of minimal installation that can be done.

Thanks to Matt and Clay for suggesting partimage.  That's what I used, 
with the flash drive, since I have no network to use.  I had a heck of a 
time getting any live CDs to boot the laptop, but I finally succeeded 
with an old version of Knoppix I had.  partimage also has a nice 
interface that makes setting all the options easy.  I also liked Adam's 
suggestion of an adaptor to allow me to connect the laptop hard drive to 
my desktop PC and just copying everything.  I almost bought a 20GB drive 
I found on CraigsList to just replace the old one, until I looked in the 
user manual I downloaded that said it probably won't handle drives 
larger than 8GB, and only drives a little over 6GB had been tested.

Now to getting Linux running on it.  I'm going to try Puppy Linux first, 
even though it's a bit of an odd duck.  I've already had it running from 
the live CD, and had a real GUI (JWM) running with about 28MB of RAM 
leftover.  The laptop only has 64MB of RAM total, so I was impressed.  I 
know I could upgrade the RAM and hard drive, and get a battery that 
works, but I don't want to sink too much money into this until I see if 
I can get it running satisfactorily.  Plus, I think it would be cool to 
have such an under-powered PC being made useful.

                                Chick


Matt Graham wrote:
> They fit 2K and MS Office on a 2G disk?  Whoa.
> 
> partimage will do this.  It has an option to split its backup files into 
> files of N meg in size, and to wait after each volume change.  I think 
> it'll allow you to umount a backup medium and sneakernet it somewhere.  
> If it doesn't, time to hook up a PCMCIA NIC.




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