Notebook cRaZyLaNd! Part 1

[Tripredacus]

Welcome to Notebook cRaZyLaNd! This is the first of 3 installments. Let me start out by saying that this will be a community project with a couple stipulations:

- I will take input into consideration

- I cannot garauntee I will be very fast at implementing them

- We are going to be dealing with some potentially severe hardware limitations.

That being said, I will give a start to this little story. Recently I had been disappointed that I have not tried playing around with computers as much anymore, at least outside of work. So today I got home and decided I could play around with my old notebooks. I had two of them in the closet, a Compaq Armada M700 and a Compaq LTE 5000. I have a second LTE 5000 but it is missing a hard drive. I also have another Compaq Armada that has a busted display. I do believe that I also have an IBM Thinkpad, however I have no idea where that is.

So I have these two notebooks but no power adapters. I go on the mad hunt for power adapters and it became a trip down computer memory lane! First I found my mud-covered GRiDCase 1520, which I keep just because it is what it is, although it never survived the flood a couple years ago. I then found another unfortunate soul, victim of the flood, which is a Toshiba Tecra. I was thinking maybe I could try turning it on... however it may either not do anything or at worst, start on fire or explode!

Last stop, digging around in the basement, I did not find any power adapters. However I did manage to find 2 PCMCIA NIC dongles as well as a 3Com Etherlink III PCMCIA NIC. After my hour or so of searching, I finally found a power adapter, but that is not all. I also found the notebook it belonged to! So now we are sitting at 3 notebooks to play around with, but currently only have AC adapter for one of them. And that is what this thread is about. If you want full specs, check the "my servers" link in my thread.

Notebook cRaZyLaNd! Part 1: Windows 2000

Computer Name: IMAGETEST06 (Windows 2000 SP2)

- Compaq Armada 1592DMT

- Intel Pentium MMX

- 64MB RAM

- 3GB HDD (IBM-DYKA-23240)

- 3Com 10/100 PCMCIA NIC

With those specs in mind, I now open this thread up to anyone. What can I possibly do with this PC? How can I make it faster or more up to date? You be the judge!

[cluberti]

Throw it as hard as you can, or better yet, make some sort of catapult system. It'll likely go really fast for a short bit before it becomes recyclable. Short of that, both will run Win9x or NT4 just fine if you can find drivers (I ran NT4 server on an Armada for years when I was younger for giggles, worked just fine).

[bpalone]

Notebook cRaZyLaNd! Part 1: Windows 2000

Computer Name: IMAGETEST06 (Windows 2000 SP2)

- Compaq Armada 1592DMT

- Intel Pentium MMX

- 64MB RAM

- 3GB HDD (IBM-DYKA-23240)

- 3Com 10/100 PCMCIA NIC

With those specs in mind, I now open this thread up to anyone. What can I possibly do with this PC? How can I make it faster or more up to date? You be the judge!

First things I see, is more memory and larger hard drive. From a quick Google, found this for memory: Link_to_memory

Then I found this for information on hard drives: Link_to_hard_drive_info

As for the OS, you might want to consider using 98se rather than 2K. I think it would perform better, but it's your game, not mine. Enjoy yourself with it, what ever you do. Good luck, from a 2K fan that has pretty much switched to the Penguin. Still play with 98 a bit, sooo....

[Tripredacus]

Yeah, I'm going to say right now that I am NOT going to be spending any money on these things. The only consideration would be to get power adapters for the other two. Also I am not going to change the OS until I corrupt this one.

[fdv]

Build a MAME version that runs your favorite arcade games?

MAME is now quite large if you download precompiled binaries so you'll need to roll your own. I am personally a Galaga fan and have a MAME I compiled with just a few cores in it (nothing after the 90's) and it ran on my crappy little notebook on Win98 great (the notebook happened to have a TV out RCA jack, which made it even better!)

[Tripredacus]

Ah yes, I have MAME installed on the LTE 5000 notebook which has no power cord. I do plan additional Notebook Crazyland topics (I'm too tired to type it right) about those other ones. The LTE 5000 has NT 3.51 on it too! I will try to remember to try some power adapters on that one tomorrow. FWIW, I got the NT 4 notebook (you need to look in the "my servers" link in my sig for the updates) to turn on using the MSI Wind AC Adaptor, even tho the values didn't exactly match up.