Laptop revival - 486DX 64MB RAM - what to do with it?

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metime

35 posts

Geek

#25162 13-Aug-2008 16:41

So, there it is. In all it's glory, with (I think, from memory) a farily small hard drive, a floppy drive, a card slor and old school Parallel and serial ports.

Now, any ideas on:

a) What to usefully do with it (apart from the obvious, like give it away or cannibalise it), and
b) How to upgrade it to do so.

I am not familiar with Linux, but wouldn't mind giving it a go to configure it. It doesn't have a USB port, but I do have a parralel port to USB cable and a USB DVD reader / writer. At the moment, it only has Windows 3.x loaded on it and I'm not sure it has the drivers to enable it to use the DVD reader.

I was thinking of maybe using it as a seerver to host a website - but not really sure about what that might entail.
I geuss it would have to run some form of Windows and then use Apache.

Thoughts?

Cheers.

nate

6473 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 458

Retired Mod

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Lifetime subscriber

#156643 13-Aug-2008 17:06

It'd probably make a great door stop

If it was me I'd cut my losses and get a second hand machine off TradeMe for couple hundred bucks.

foobar

186 posts

Master Geek

#156662 13-Aug-2008 18:21

There are some very compact GNU/Linux distributions out there. You should be fine, especially if you consider using it as a server, in which case you don't need the graphical user interfaces / desktops, which tend to take much more money and CPU. You basically only need to install a compact server distro.

Apache can take a bit of memory. Try nginx or lighttpd as web servers, they require much less memory resources and are both very, very fast.

The blog: foobar on computers, software and the rest of the world: http://www.geekzone.co.nz/foobar

metime

35 posts

Geek

#157403 16-Aug-2008 12:08

Thanks foobar - I might get back to you more questions.