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Toshiba Satellite Pro 490XCDT

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Toshiba Satellite Pro 490XCDT Dan 10-13-2007
Posted by Dan on October 13, 2007, 7:31 am
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I have just acquired this old Laptop for free. Its a P2/266 with
160MB or RAM. Would this machine be powerful enough for a basic
webbrowsing/emailing machine? Also would it be possible to make it
wireless?

I have read a bit about Linux nut dont know very much. Is there a
simple Windows style Linux interface I can use just to run a web
browser?

Any advice appreciated

Dan


Posted by Barry Watzman on October 13, 2007, 4:53 pm
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Yes and Yes to both questions.

It won't be a lot of fun, but it's useable. Best os is probably Windows
98SE. It meets the minimum specs for XP but just barely and it will be
really, really ugly.

It has cardbus support, so any WiFI PC Card will work as long as it has
drivers for the operating system you use.


Dan wrote:
> I have just acquired this old Laptop for free. Its a P2/266 with
> 160MB or RAM. Would this machine be powerful enough for a basic
> webbrowsing/emailing machine? Also would it be possible to make it
> wireless?
>
> I have read a bit about Linux nut dont know very much. Is there a
> simple Windows style Linux interface I can use just to run a web
> browser?
>
> Any advice appreciated
>
> Dan
>

Posted by dg on October 19, 2007, 12:15 pm
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> I have just acquired this old Laptop for free. Its a P2/266 with
> 160MB or RAM. Would this machine be powerful enough for a basic
> webbrowsing/emailing machine? Also would it be possible to make it
> wireless?
>
> I have read a bit about Linux nut dont know very much. Is there a
> simple Windows style Linux interface I can use just to run a web
> browser?
>
> Any advice appreciated
>
> Dan

I've used Damn Small Linux (DSL) on an IBM ThinkPad, 233 MHz Pentium
MMX upgraded to 128 MB of RAM, as a loaner machine. It is very
satisfactorily fast, had correct detection and installation (though
this was purely luck, I'm sure) of video and sound as well as every
PCMCIA / PC-Card modem, ethernet, and WiFi card I had laying around,
and has had no problem connecting to networks. On the other hand,
I've had two similar-vintage Compaq Presario 1230 laptops which have
233 MHz Cyrix MII CPU, as well as a proprietary implementation of a
fairly common video & sound chipset. I have yet to find any
distribution of Linux that doesn't lock up these laptops hard during
installation--but then, I've yet to find any flavor of Windows that
actually comes with the full set of drivers; even after hunting down
all the drivers, the use of so many proprietary implementations of
various chips means that Windows runs poorly on these specific
Compaqs.

DSL is less than 50 MB as an ISO and is a boot-and-run-from-CD "Live"
distribution, but with full installation and upgrade capabilities once
you've booted, so even based just on download time I'd start with
that. See if it recognizes and loads all your devices, then read the
help files and installation tips in the DSL forums before proceeding
with an installation to hard-drive! If you can upgrade to 256 MB of
RAM, DSL can be configured to boot into a RAM-disk thus avoiding
having to refer to files on the CD or hard-drive when opening
programs, and significantly reducing power usage.


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