I have a soft spot for old computers. A while back, I inherited a Sony
Vaio PCG-
XG29 laptop that had obviously seen its share of travel and abuse. Recently, I've decided to work on the machine a little and try to see if I can bring it back from being a useless,
unsecured Win98 block of circuits to something more useful using some flavor of Unix.
Well, I managed to install
VectorLinux on it but it was obvious that the 128
mb of RAM that it was pushing wasn't going to cut it. After scouring the Web, I found a cheap place to buy some old RAM and I manage to snag another stick of 128
mb which would max out the system at 256
mb of RAM. It's not a lot compared to today's machines, but it's all that this baby can handle. The
Today, this battle-scarred
Vaio lives on.
AbiWord and
Firefox are now happy with the extra RAM and I am actually posting this entry using those applications.
YouTube is choppy but I think it will always be choppy since the processor is not fast enough to deal with online video. I tried Pandora Radio on it and that seemed to work pretty well.
The DVD drive works will with
Xine, so I can also use the bugger as a DVD player.
The only thing left to do to is to make this system portable again. I'm going to need to replace the dead battery but I'll save that project for another day.
All in all, it's a good day to bring back old computers to life!
Labels: computer repair, geriatric tech, linux, tech addiction
Concerned that I would eventually run out of hard drive space on my Asus Eee PC 901XP, I decided to get a usb hard drive. Of all the drives out there, I went with the Western Digital My Passport Essential 320GB USB 2.0 Portable Hard Drive.
