I dug my old laptop out yesterday, it hasn't seen light of day for ages and thought I'd check it still works - which it does, albeit very slowly.
The beast in question is a Toshiba 3440CT, with a PIII 500mhz cpu, 64mb ram and a 6gb hard drive, plus some puny graphics chip with 8mb RAM - S3 Savage IIRC. It's tiny so has no room for any internal drives; I have a USB floppy (bootable) and USB cCD-RW (non-bootable)
On the upside, it's very very small and light
At the mo it's struggling to run Windows 2000 and I don't really have any practical use for it, so I might as well use it as a guinea pig to try out Linux
My question is, does anyone know of a version of Linux that will run happily (i.e. better than Win2K currently does) on such a puny computer? Obviously I don't want to throw any money at the laptop to upgrade, but all it'll be used for is web browsing, word processor/spreadsheety stuff (if I can find freebie Linux apps that are compatible with MS Office XP) and, eventually (i.e. when I work out how), to play music from my main PC via wireless network. It has to be a free Linux distro as I'm stingy and must also be easy for someone who's never ever dealt with Linux before to install. Plus whatever I end up using will have to be installed from another partition on the HDD due to the lack of bootable CD drive...
Cheers!
The beast in question is a Toshiba 3440CT, with a PIII 500mhz cpu, 64mb ram and a 6gb hard drive, plus some puny graphics chip with 8mb RAM - S3 Savage IIRC. It's tiny so has no room for any internal drives; I have a USB floppy (bootable) and USB cCD-RW (non-bootable)
On the upside, it's very very small and light At the mo it's struggling to run Windows 2000 and I don't really have any practical use for it, so I might as well use it as a guinea pig to try out Linux
My question is, does anyone know of a version of Linux that will run happily (i.e. better than Win2K currently does) on such a puny computer? Obviously I don't want to throw any money at the laptop to upgrade, but all it'll be used for is web browsing, word processor/spreadsheety stuff (if I can find freebie Linux apps that are compatible with MS Office XP) and, eventually (i.e. when I work out how), to play music from my main PC via wireless network. It has to be a free Linux distro as I'm stingy
and must also be easy for someone who's never ever dealt with Linux before to install. Plus whatever I end up using will have to be installed from another partition on the HDD due to the lack of bootable CD drive...Cheers!
