Somebody at my wife's work threw away an old laptop computer. Her company has an IT department, and when something is not worth their bother they discard it. It had something wrong with its BIOS memory battery and was a bit short on memory and disk. For about $200 I maxed out its memory and disk and replaced the battery. The hardware works fine.
It was still rather slow, like incredibly slow compared with my high end desktop, but I spent some time fussing with the OS -- Windows 98 -- and trying to speed it up somewhat. I removed every unnecessary program, driver, network setting, database client, etcetera. It was still as slow as taffy in winter.
I tried updating the OS with every possible update MS had, but there was nothing but trouble during all those attempts. It would crash during the updates and screw things up terribly. Finally I tracked things into the Virus Scan software -- which was rather ancient -- so just for grins I disabled it.
Suddenly the old clunker was running nearly as fast as a newer laptop with Windows XP. The virus software had been using all the available memory and processing time the thing had. I was able to download all the correct updates and better virus stuff and now the thing runs like a top. I am using it to write this blog entry.
Not everybody has the experience I have with computers, nor the patience. I wouldn't expect everyone to have the same luck. But for $200 I have a really good IBM ThinkPad that runs Firefox and all my various homegrown software development tools just dandy.
What else are corporations throwing away?
It was still rather slow, like incredibly slow compared with my high end desktop, but I spent some time fussing with the OS -- Windows 98 -- and trying to speed it up somewhat. I removed every unnecessary program, driver, network setting, database client, etcetera. It was still as slow as taffy in winter.
I tried updating the OS with every possible update MS had, but there was nothing but trouble during all those attempts. It would crash during the updates and screw things up terribly. Finally I tracked things into the Virus Scan software -- which was rather ancient -- so just for grins I disabled it.
Suddenly the old clunker was running nearly as fast as a newer laptop with Windows XP. The virus software had been using all the available memory and processing time the thing had. I was able to download all the correct updates and better virus stuff and now the thing runs like a top. I am using it to write this blog entry.
Not everybody has the experience I have with computers, nor the patience. I wouldn't expect everyone to have the same luck. But for $200 I have a really good IBM ThinkPad that runs Firefox and all my various homegrown software development tools just dandy.
What else are corporations throwing away?
2 comments:
Can you tell me where I might find such an easily repairable laptop in rural East Texas?
Sorry. This is west California. I feel fairly lucky, even here. But E-bay sells a lot of old laptops for almost the same money. dd
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