Shit to do with an ancient computer?

yalborap

So, I was just handed an ANCIENT, ancient laptop. A Compaq Presario 1200. Here's the specs from Wikipedia:
o 12.1" LCD Screen
o 500MHz processor
o Type 2 Cardbus slot
o PS2 serial port
o 1 USB port
o 3 Game MRI Slots
o Lithium Ion battery
o 64 MB RAM
o 8 GB Toshiba Hard Disk Drive
o CD drive
o Onboard speakers
o 3.5" Floppy Disk Drive

So, not exactly a high-end device here. However, it was free, and while it's missing its battery, I think I could rig it up into something useful. But I'm not sure WHAT this puppy can even handle, given its weak abilities.

So what do you guys suggest? Think I could get this guy to play music? Maybe some decent old PC games? Maybe an ultra-lightweight Linux distro, to turn it into a workstation?

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yalborap

I THINK it has VGA out. It certainly appears to be a VGA port, but that is also a bit of a generic port.

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Seeks

You can play games of the Baldurs Gate 1/2 and Fallout 1/2 era, which is basically what I spend most of my time playing even today anyway.

There are a few linux distros that should run on your system pretty well. Just google things like "lightweight linux," "small linux," "usb linux," etc. A lot of how fast a given distro runs is the desktop environment, and I can't imagine something like XFCE or whatever taking up a huge amount of ram. With 64mb, you'll likely want to stay away from Gnome or KDE.

With an 8gb hard drive, you may even be able to dual boot. .... .............maaaaybe. Windows... fucking... 98 or something, plus (insert lightweight) linux, split down the middle minus 500mb for a swap partition or something.

Silvoculous

The RAM is very limiting. I know it isn't going to sound appealing to sink money into something this old, but if you get 256MB in that laptop, you've opened up room for a bunch of new things. Windows 2000 will run very smoothly. Any distro with XFCE should fly along.

See how much RAM would cost for it. If it's $arm.leg or even $finger, forget about it. I ran Damn Small Linux 3.2 on an even older laptop than that; one of the Compaq Armadas. 233MHz PII MMX with 64MB of RAM. It ran just fine and there were quite a few interesting things I managed to do with it.

Jokerman

Silvoculous wrote: »

The RAM is very limiting. I know it isn't going to sound appealing to sink money into something this old, but if you get 256MB in that laptop, you've opened up room for a bunch of new things. Windows 2000 will run very smoothly. Any distro with XFCE should fly along.

See how much RAM would cost for it. If it's $arm.leg or even $finger, forget about it. I ran Damn Small Linux 3.2 on an even older laptop than that; one of the Compaq Armadas. 233MHz PII MMX with 64MB of RAM. It ran just fine and there were quite a few interesting things I managed to do with it.

It'll manage to play Diablo 2.

Silvoculous

Or Half-Life/Opposing Force/Blue Shift. Deus Ex will run fine too.

Maybe even the original Unreal Tournament?

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meatflower

No it matters. It's too old for those. Especially Deus Ex, that's the Unreal Tournament engine.

I mean you can play HL with the software renderer. It's like DOOM:Black Mesa edition.

Seeks

I managed to play Deus Ex and HL on a Packard Bell with 166mhz and 32mb of ram.

Not very well, but you can do it. Same with Quake 2, though Deus Ex is reeeeeaally pushing it hard. Of course, it also had a sweet Voodoo 3.

meatflower

Yeah the Voodoo 3 makes all the difference in the world. This computer has nothing.

The only games this will be playing are 2D. Which is great really, there's so many...especially if you like adventure and CRPGS. I recommend Sanitarium and Planescape:Torment.

Einhander

Assuming you wanted to use it for games:

500MHz isn't the bottleneck at all, it's that 64MB of RAM that will kill you. I run XP Pro on a 500MHz desktop with 384MB of RAM, and it runs fine. If you do decide to run a Windows OS, you're probably going to have to stick with Windows 98 (Windows 2000 is based on NT instead of 9x, so you'll have compatibility issues with older games), and if you're running '98 then you will want to keep the machine off of your network since it's ridiculously vulnerable by today's standards.

Or you could just run DOS 6, and use it as a classic game machine. Why bother with DosBox when you can just run everything natively? Diablo will run fine, I once had Diablo 2 running on a Pentium Pro 200MHz with 128MB RAM, so it would be worth a shot. Starcraft will run fine (minimum specs are somewhere around a Pentium 90 with either 16 or 32MB RAM if I remember right).

You could run Quake, Quake II, Half-Life/Blue Shift/Opposing Force in software mode (there's plenty of 3D that this system will do), or you could check out some of id/3D Realms/Apogee's older side scrollers like Duke Nukem I and II, Halloween Harry, Biomenace, and a ton more.

If you wanted to check out some old first person shooters, you could try Rise of the Triad or Blake Stone, you can track down all of the various classic DOOM versions.

If you're more of an RPG gamer you should track down Ultima Underworld and it's sequel.

Or, pick up a cheap external USB hard drive and throw on a bunch of music, wire your sound output to your stereo, and run Media Player Classic or whatever low resource music player you can find (depending on what OS you go wth), turning it into your own jukebox.

Or do both.

UncleSporky

Are you sure 500MHz isn't still a major bottleneck? My ASUS EEE is at 900MHz with 2 gig of RAM and Diablo 2 runs pretty choppy. I guess it works, though.

I love underpowered hardware and seeing how far you can push it. Too many people get used to modern computers and assume they won't be able to do anything fun or useful with older stuff.

zanetheinsane

Compaq has a lot of Presario 1200 Notebook models. Do you know the precise model number, i.e. 1200 followed by two or three letters?

jackal

Dip it in acid, and harvest its gold?

Einhander

UncleSporky wrote: »

Are you sure 500MHz isn't still a major bottleneck? My ASUS EEE is at 900MHz with 2 gig of RAM and Diablo 2 runs pretty choppy. I guess it works, though.

I love underpowered hardware and seeing how far you can push it. Too many people get used to modern computers and assume they won't be able to do anything fun or useful with older stuff.

Does your eee have an SSD? Diablo II's minimum specs are a Pentium 233 with 32MB RAM for singleplayer, so if you have an SSD then it's slow data transfer rate might be giving you choppy gameplay. (If you've got a 900MHz, that means you've got a Celeron and not an Atom, right? I thought all of the Celerons came with standard drives, so I don't know. I'm looking at picking up the $299 1.6GHz Atom soon, so this troubles me, since one of the games I look forward to having in a portable form is Diablo 2) Minimum specs climb a little bit for the expansion if you want to run in 800x600 mode instead of the 640x480 in the original.

His machine is double the minimum for vanilla Diablo 2, so it should perform well. Of course, he could always just download the demo and find out.

I forgot how old this game is:

Blizzard's download page wrote:

Note: This demo is 135 MB in size and will take approximately 9 hours to download with a 33.6k modem.

UncleSporky

Einhander wrote: »

UncleSporky wrote: »

Are you sure 500MHz isn't still a major bottleneck? My ASUS EEE is at 900MHz with 2 gig of RAM and Diablo 2 runs pretty choppy. I guess it works, though.

I love underpowered hardware and seeing how far you can push it. Too many people get used to modern computers and assume they won't be able to do anything fun or useful with older stuff.

Does your eee have an SSD? Diablo II's minimum specs are a Pentium 233 with 32MB RAM for singleplayer, so if you have an SSD then it's slow data transfer rate might be giving you choppy gameplay. (If you've got a 900MHz, that means you've got a Celeron and not an Atom, right? I thought all of the Celerons came with standard drives, so I don't know. I'm looking at picking up the $299 1.6GHz Atom soon, so this troubles me, since one of the games I look forward to having in a portable form is Diablo 2) Minimum specs climb a little bit for the expansion if you want to run in 800x600 mode instead of the 640x480 in the original.

His machine is double the minimum for vanilla Diablo 2, so it should perform well. Of course, he could always just download the demo and find out.

I forgot how old this game is:

Blizzard's download page wrote:

Note: This demo is 135 MB in size and will take approximately 9 hours to download with a 33.6k modem.

I have one of the first 4G EEEs with a 4 gig SSD. Not really sure what the issue is. Whether I play windowed or not it's a bit slower than it ought to be. I have an up-clocker and IIRC this original EEE is actually set at 600 MHz, and 900 is the max, something like that...at 600 the game runs in slow motion, 900 is mostly fine but choppy with more stuff onscreen. Maybe I'm just picky since it's completely playable.

I play Morrowind on minimum settings just fine, with a few framerate issues.

PeregrineFalcon

I can't find much on the graphics chip in there aside from the name copypasta "Trident Cyberblade i7 8MB AGP 2X" but it might have some rudimentary 3D support.

Find a 128MB chip on the cheap (that's the most that'll work, supposedly) and give yourself a nice whopping 160MB of SDRAM power, and you could probably muscle your way through UT engine games.

Einhander

I think that model ships with 4MB or VRAM, which coupled wth the SSD might be causing your slowdown (especially since you say it chops up when there is a lot of stuff onscreen). Unless you're running Linux and playing D2 using WINE? I've just read that some people have had performance gains on Diablo 2 using different video drivers.

But we're sidetracking anyway.

Rigor Mortis

Some music sequencers (Cockos Reaper does it out of the box, Sonar/Cubase/Logic need plugins) let you send MIDI & audio data over ethernet so you can plug older computers into a hub and set up a render farm for your music production.

It's what I plan to do with all my old computers.

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Dark Shroud

If you want to run Windows on that thing then look into Tiny XP. You can read about it here.

I also vote to look into upgrading the memory. I have a 400Mhz P2 desktop with 384mb that works fine for many light applications. I have an old 233mhz that runs XP with 384mb as well.

Barcardi

This sounds random but if you know anyone that is starting up a business, particularly a restaurant or some other place that could use a laptop to place orders/receive orders, you should give it to them. All its really needed for is a cash register and for spreadsheet use. It would be a nice help to such a person.

Elimination

its pretty hard to make a computer that is weaker than most peoples cell phones do something usefull...

zanetheinsane

PeregrineFalcon wrote: »

I can't find much on the graphics chip in there aside from the name copypasta "Trident Cyberblade i7 8MB AGP 2X" but it might have some rudimentary 3D support.

Find a 128MB chip on the cheap (that's the most that'll work, supposedly) and give yourself a nice whopping 160MB of SDRAM power, and you could probably muscle your way through UT engine games.

Although not much better, this notebook says it will accept 256MB PC100 144pin SODIMMs, for a whopping 320MB.

Einhander

Elimination wrote: »

its pretty hard to make a computer that is weaker than most peoples cell phones do something usefull...

Because everyone knows that computers weren't useful until five years ago, right?

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PeregrineFalcon

mcdermott wrote: »

Elimination wrote: »

its pretty hard to make a computer that is weaker than most peoples cell phones do something usefull...

You're probably overestimating the power of most people's phones. The iPhone is clocked at like 433MHz (underclocked, but still). My Palm runs at about the same. Most consumer routers run at like 200MHz. You can do all kinds of useful shit, even today, at 500MHz.

Einhander already covered this, but I thought I'd go with the non-snarky version. Just for balance.

Because my first reaction was just WTF?

I'll throw in the obligatory comment that if you think you can compare MHz as a sole metric of performance you are fucking retarded.

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