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OSes and Applications for Aging Machines?
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?"
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.
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