DeadDude Posted February 12, 2007 Share Posted February 12, 2007 I was given this lil' laptop...It is a Gateway Solo 2300, 32megs of ram, 800x600 LCD, external CDROM, 2gig Hard Drive.I have attempted to upgrade the ram unsuccessfully... I think I got bad ram...It has an internal floppy (now I finally got a machine with a floppy drive!)I currently have my weird 98SE installed on it (more info in autopatcher thread), and Autopatcher 1.5-1.6 (yeah, I'm behind)..Here's a list of what I've done:Autopatcher 1.5 & 1.6 updateIE 5.5 full installFireFox 1.5 full installOpen Office (latest version... haven't tested it yet, but it installed flawlessly)K-Meleon full installJava (latest 9x version advertised)Azereus (latest 9x version advertised)Uninstalled JavaUninstalled Azereus (resource HOG!)Installed Shockwave Flash pluginsInstalled RAM Booster (kick a** proggie that is *still* around)Win98LiteRemoved IE 5.5 and changed shell to no web integration (but not the 95 shell)Okay... so now what? I have tried using ProgMan as the shell (to save actually a LOT of RAM compared to standard explorer shell)... it was a pain... I can't find an app to auto-create program groups and items from folders (can go the other way; make progman items and groups folders and icons).The clock battery is shot (actually, all the batteries are dead).What I need to know is:Smallest, faster web browser for forums and gmail.comBest light weight shell (pref one with a proper system tray so my wifi card works properly)DOS-level scandisk and defrag (I forgot how to trick 98 into using the DOS versions)Any other tweaks I should do.A BitTorrent client that works well on 32megs ram total.I know that Beniot will suggest 95. That's great. But please tell me the rest of the apps to use on 95 to fulfill my needs... (web browser, office suite, bitTorrent client)Oh yeah, I also installed a couple of pinball games... Man, pinball has gone to crap on newer pcs...The harddrive has 32,000ish bad sectors... I got a spare I can use if/when it dies... And the Win98 versions of scandisk and defrag can't complete from lack of ram... This little machine is pretty cool, and I want to keep it alive for testing software and whatnot... (I also want to fiddle around with my weird 98 cd... no probs other than a browseui.dll error... and that was resolved by autopatcher somehow!! Sweeeeeeet)TIA!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BenoitRen Posted February 12, 2007 Share Posted February 12, 2007 Yes, I would have suggested Win95, but I see you already have Win98 SE on it. I would suggest you keep K-Meleon as your web browser. It's the best fit for your hardware.I've never experimented with other shells, but ripping out the web integration was the right thing to do. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DeadDude Posted February 12, 2007 Author Share Posted February 12, 2007 Totally... the ram usage jumped from 6megs free after boot up to 12megs...I am more than willing to drop it down to 95... I got the CD somewhere of OSR 2.1 (I think)any other suggestions??what version of winamp would work best on this little puppy?? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BenoitRen Posted February 12, 2007 Share Posted February 12, 2007 I don't know if it has all the features you want, but I personally use WinAmp 2.90 Lite for the odd MP3 every once in a while. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DeadDude Posted February 13, 2007 Author Share Posted February 13, 2007 yeah, it works ok...I was hoping you would know of which earlier version would run the smoothest... I seem to recall 2.52 or something similar was the last to use the low-quality decoders...low quality decoder is just fine for me- if you know what I mean now....I shoe-horned another 16meg stick into this just now... seems to be ok.... weird thing is, the laptop has no onboard ram... and has a 32meg stick and a 16 meg stick... but it has 64megs now? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
patchworks Posted February 13, 2007 Share Posted February 13, 2007 1. Try recovery tools from a BootCD for bad sectors...2. remove Windows Media Player and VFW codecs, substitute by VLC3. remove internet explorer (IEradicator) and install K-Meleon4. use µTorrent Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DeadDude Posted February 13, 2007 Author Share Posted February 13, 2007 thanks 4 the links.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TravisO Posted February 13, 2007 Share Posted February 13, 2007 I agree, use Winamp 2.9 or 2.91, I forget the last official version of 2.9x. Also as a FYI, there were some beta 2.9x that were like 2.95 or so, these ARE NOT 2.9x, they are actually betas for 3.0, stay away from them.Also, you should actually find an installed copy of the newest version of 5.x and copy the codecs from it and put them in 2.9 which will give you better & faster support, it might even be lighter on ram, who knows.The files I'm talking about are in: C:\Program Files\Winamp\Plugins\all the in_*.dll files, just copy them into your 2.9x setup. I've tested this, and it works, but I didn't do ram or speed comparisons fyi. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BenoitRen Posted February 14, 2007 Share Posted February 14, 2007 I was hoping you would know of which earlier version would run the smoothest...2.90 definitely runs smoother than 3.x or 5.x.I shoe-horned another 16meg stick into this just now... seems to be ok.... weird thing is, the laptop has no onboard ram... and has a 32meg stick and a 16 meg stick... but it has 64megs now?Maybe it's actually a 32 MB stick? 2. remove Windows Media Player and VFW codecs, substitute by VLCI don't agree. At least for me, VLC is slower, and doesn't use the codecs I installed for WMP, so no Windows Media file playback.WMP 6.1 is the last version to not require IE. You can use version 6.4 if IE's presence doesn't bother you. I managed to find WMP 6.0 months ago. Tell me if you want it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DeadDude Posted February 14, 2007 Author Share Posted February 14, 2007 By all means I ould appreciate a copy of WMP 6.0...I have actually ended up repartitioning the hard drive... Now I got NT4.0 and 98SE installed... trying to dig up info on installing WfWG and 95 on the other partitions...I divided the hard drive into a 2gig partition (for 98SE currently... the most used OS)and a 300meg partition (for 95 and/or WfWG)a 300meg partition (for NT4)and a 750ish meg partition (for files used across the OSs)So far, it all works GREAT!!!!I got Winamp 2.95 (I checked, it is NOT a 3.0 beta), and have been using this laptop to stream some radio and surf the net for the past few days... Works **** near perfect (considering what it is)...I remembered how to tweak Winamp (I got a P90 8Meg laptop that is a media player now), and now it all runs smoooooooth.I figured out the ram issue (mentioned briefly in the AutoPatcher thread), and now it has 48megs instead of possible 64... and I discovered I got a 32meg stick it will take inside of a 486 laptop sitting here.... (don't wanna kill the 486 though, it is *nearly* as capable)so, any suggestions for low footprint software?? open office takes MAJOR harddrive space... and I just need Word compatibility.... (I still need to strip out the other proggies in Open Office...)I can't get over how well this puppy runs... TThe soundcard has treble and base controls... and 3D and ZPort something... bottom line- audio sounds pretty darn good considering the size and age of the speakers... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BenoitRen Posted February 14, 2007 Share Posted February 14, 2007 WMP 6.0It will show up as WMP 5.2 under Software, but it really is 6.0, as evidenced by the program's about screen. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
erpdude8 Posted March 3, 2007 Share Posted March 3, 2007 I would suggest you keep K-Meleon as your web browser. It's the best fit for your hardware.Use K-meleon version 1.02. get it here:http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php?id=Downloador get Opera web browser from the www.opera.com site Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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