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OSes and Applications for Aging Machines?

Posted by Cliff on from the reclaiming-older-hardware-for-other-things dept.

TellarHK asks: "My aunt and uncle, both completely unfamiliar with computers, are looking to replace a broken word processor with something new. They'd like to either spend as few dollars as possible on a computer, or replace the word processor. Silly me, I mentioned I had a spare PC kicking around. It's a Digital Equipment 'Starion 930' Pentium 100 with 40M, and onboard video of an unknown type. As this machine is going to be used for word processing, I need an OS that will work with my newly dusted-off Lexmark Z11 printer. So what are my options? Will QNX handle the limited video and printer? Is there a WYSIWYG solution for FreeDOS? Is there a chance in hell any Linux distribution can give me graphics? I've got a whopping three gig drive in there. What can I do with it?"

3 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. Overkill - Ha! by moosesocks · · Score: 4, Informative

    I have an old laptop which I use for a similar purpose: an IBM thinkpad 755, which is a 486/75 with 20mb of RAM, and what is possibly the world's most troublesome video adapter.

    Despite these shortcomings, I am still able to run Windows 98 with Word 2000. '98 boots up in about a minute, and word takes about 10 seconds to load. For an 8 year old laptop, that's pretty darn good. The only drawback is that the type is somewat laggy, although the system described in this article should be nearly twice as fast.

    --
    -- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
  2. debian by rodentia · · Score: 3, Informative

    Linux will run like a dream on that thing, man. I am running debian w/ graphical environment on AMD K-5 100, 32M, 500M HD.

    Loverly.

    --
    illegitimii non ingravare
  3. Re:Do your research by rafa · · Score: 3, Informative

    There are a lot of light apps one can run. I had a similar setup up until not so long ago. These are the apps that I found ran nicely on that hardware.

    • xwc - great little file manager, really fast
    • blackbox - as mentioned
    • dfm - for desktop icons, your relatives might like this app.
    • gkrellm - system monitor. It acatully feels faster if you can see the CPU go at it. Really. :)
    • xscreensaver
    • asmix - to set volume, dockapp
    • ascd - cd player, dockapp
    • some aterms
    • Abiword
    --
    [Science] is one of the very few things that raises human life a little above farce and gives it the grace of tragedy.