Oh what shall I do with it?

massahwahl

massahwahl

VIP Member
So my uncle who is a snap-on dealer and has booku computer parts laying around gave me a giant box of computers and parts yesterday. Included in this is a compaq presario 1245 laptop. Obviously this thing is ancient and runs windows 98 but I'm curious if there is anything I can or should do with it. As far as I know it still works although it needs a new adapter cable (anyone have one? Not part with box, but the 3prong male to female end?)

Anyway, any ideas? If not ill hock it on ebay as others are going for $20-$30.

I also got a brand new compaq tower that has xp which I have no idea what I'm going to use it for either. So let's here some interesting ideas!
 
1- Set them to run folding @ home(well, the windows xp tower)
2- Install Gentoo or Slackware on them
3- Make a digital picture frame from the laptop
4- Hookup a usb gps receiver and use as in car laptop gps
 
I don't know the technical name... most people call it a clover leaf, 'cause it vaguely looks like a four leaf clover. I have a few of those too, but none to spare. You could grab one off of eBay for cheap.
 
bomberboysk said:
1- Set them to run folding @ home(well, the windows xp tower)
2- Install Gentoo or Slackware on them
3- Make a digital picture frame from the laptop
4- Hookup a usb gps receiver and use as in car laptop gps
Click to expand...

After I actually got it out of the box its running win2ksp2 which is actually better in my opinion :P I have to see what shape the laptop is in once I get a cord for it but the car idea is pretty slick, is there a guide to setting a carputer up anywhere?

I will setup F@H on this 2k machine and let it go. I got it setup and its never even been used by the looks of it. There was still a dell demo something or other software on it that had everything locked down so Im formatting it right now and putting 2000 back on for the time being, i may through linux on it sometime in the future. Eventually i think it will become my MythTV frontend when we get a house. Its a dell something or other, cant actually tell yet because the stickers have been removed but the 2000 tag is still on so im gravy atm
 
ukulele_ninja said:
After I actually got it out of the box its running win2ksp2 which is actually better in my opinion :P I have to see what shape the laptop is in once I get a cord for it but the car idea is pretty slick, is there a guide to setting a carputer up anywhere?

I will setup F@H on this 2k machine and let it go. I got it setup and its never even been used by the looks of it. There was still a dell demo something or other software on it that had everything locked down so Im formatting it right now and putting 2000 back on for the time being, i may through linux on it sometime in the future. Eventually i think it will become my MythTV frontend when we get a house. Its a dell something or other, cant actually tell yet because the stickers have been removed but the 2000 tag is still on so im gravy atm
Click to expand...

Well, i dont wanna post a link to another forum here but type "carputer forums" into google and hit the first link, wealth of knowledge on carputer stuff;)
 
well this thing runs pretty damn slow with 2000 on it. I cant even get it to correctly watch flash videos (hulu.com) correctly without glitching so its off with 2000 and on with ubuntu 9.04! Hopefully that will do the trick. Heres the specs:

Dell Optiplex GX150
256 MB Ram
80Gig Hdd
1.0 Ghz Intel Celeron Processor
 
tlarkin said:
Donate it to those who don't have a computer. That is what I would do, or recycle them.
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Not a bad idea really, I doubt im going to find anything to do with this dell and we do have a computer society here in town that takes donations.

As for the laptop, its in pretty beat up shape and i dont know if its even going to run or not, but we'll see.
 
Ubuntu hangs after the login screen from the livecd and it wont get past the initial desktop sequence from full install. Going to try DSL this time.
 
Tried Fedora 10 first, stuck on black screen with cursor for about 20 minutes but the hard drive and dvd-drive are still working, maybe it will take.
 
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