[…] up from the previous two junkers that I managed to run into the ground. If you remember correctly, my Presario 1240 had a rather interesting life running Damn Small Linux, Slax, Fluxbuntu and then vanilla Ubuntu […]

[…] There are several public nethack servers that let you play via telnet. The biggest and most popular one is located at alt.org. Or at least they are the one that shows up on Google results first. You simply telnet in, create an account and play online. This is such an awesome concept that I decided I need some of that. I want my own public server! This would be a perfect new role for that funky old Compaq Presario sitting under my desk and currently running Ubuntulite. So I started digging around for a solution. […]

[…] This post is yet another entry in the Compaq Presario 1240 saga. If you have been reading this blog for the past week or so, you know what is going on. If you are new, let me explain. Last December I “inherited” some old laptops. And by “inherited” I mean someone gave them to me saying “if you don’t want them, I’m just gonna throw them out”. One of them was the ancient, ancient Presario 1240 with 200MHz CPU and 98 MB of RAM. At first I tried to set it up with Windows and perhaps give it to a relative, but the system was just to slow, even when I set it up with bbLean as the default shell. So I decided Linux was the way to go. Over the past few days I tried several lightweight distributions including Deli Linux (which didn’t have ndiswrapper) DSL Linux, Arch Linux (which didn’t work) and Slax Popcorn. I was not entirely happy with either of those systems. […]

[…] If you read some of my previous posts, you might remember that I inherited some old laptops back in December. One of them was a really old Compaq with 200 MHz CPU and 64 MB of RAM. […]

I installed Win2k on the Compaq and it is running just fine. I found an old Belkin F5D7010 Wireless G card but I could not get it working on it (which leads me to believe that the card is bad). My own Linksys WPC54G ver. 1.2 worked just fine though.

You just need to remember that the drivers for ver. 1.2 are really listed as ver. 2.0 on Linksys website. :mrgreen:

I managed to upgrade it to Service Pack 4, but after that the machine was just sitting at the Windows Update screen and idling for 20 minutes till I had to reboot it after installing some other software. Sometimes the new update process takes ages on the old Win2k machines so I’m not that concerned. I’ll let it run longer next time.

I also installed Age of Empires II and Caesar III on it (two of my dads long time favorite titles).

As for the Dell – I’m still shopping around for a display. I’m hoping I can get one for below $50. Other than that, I will need to hook it up to an external monitor over the weekend, and see if I can reinstall Windows.

How are they doing so far?