Reviving An Old Pentium Libretto

[jyl]

I've decided to revive the old Libretto L100. Why? No good reason.

Anyway, this is a Pentium 166 with, IIRC, 32 MB of RAM max. It originally ran Win 98, I think. I have had Win XP running on it, but the RAM limitation makes things very hard. I had to disable every windows service I could do without and even then, it thrashed the hard drive just switching from one application to another. So I put it away, that was about 7 years ago.

Now I've figured out that with a SSD, RAM limitations are less troublesome because Windows can access the pagefile (virtual RAM) pretty quickly.

So, what O/S should I load up?

Win XP? All the Libretto L100 drivers etc for Windows are still available on the net. Or some flavour of Linux? I know nothing about Linux, so if I go that route it needs to be very simple. I've read about something called Damn Small Linux that was meant for older computers.

[emcon5]

Do they make an IDE SSD?

[slodave]

Originally Posted by emcon5

Do they make an IDE SSD?

Yes.

[id10t]

Leave it as is and put Debian or Puppy Linux on it

[GH85Carrera]

A friend of mine that was born in 1982 resurrected an old IBM PC 4.7 MHz with 640K of RAM. I let him "borrow" my copy of DOS 1.1 It boots from the floppy and has the other floppy for data storage. There are no sub directories! Unfortunately I threw away my old 1200 baud modem but he found a 9600 baud screamer. He now has a "computer" that is the same age as he is.

I was surprised that old 5.25 inch DOS floppy even worked. The Compaq 2.1 DOS floppies I have would not read.

[red-beard]

I still have my Toshiba 1200HD. At the time, it had 640K of RAM. I installed a special 1200BAUD modem card which brought the RAM up to 2MB. It has a 10MB harddriive and a 720K floppy drive, which made it difficult to install DOS 6.2.

It still runs. The battery is dead and the LCD screen is cracked, but I can hook up an old VGA display and it will boot.

In the 1990's I found an old TI computer from the late 1970's at a flea market. The guy wanted list price for it ($120). It was worth maybe $20. He wouldn't deal. I think my old Commodore-64 is around someplace...

[azasadny]

Load Ubuntu 11.04 on it

[Paul_Heery]

I would not load Ubuntu on this device. It is a low-powered device, you need a distro that is designed for this type of machine.

You should look at Download - Linux Mint
It will be faster and more responsive than Ubuntu.

[9dreizig]

Darn I take a few days off to get a hip replaced and I miss a golden opportunity to pile on!

[sammyg2]

I hafta ask, why?

Maybe for the same reason I keep an old 486SX-50 overdrive chip in a drawer. Totally worthless except for the tiny amount of gold on it.
It was from the first puter I worked on and I guess it's sentimental or something.

[Scott R]

Even with an SSD drive it's going to be spending all of it's time paging, which will still be limited to the speed of the IDE controller. Would be a waste of money to put an SSD drive in a machine like that.

[Scuba Steve]

That's kind of the same reason I have a 386 motherboard (wall art in the office). I also have a 512Ke - the first kind of Mac I ever used.

My dad on the other hand... he has stuff going back to the punch card era. He's the first person at his university to have a personal computer that you didn't have to build yourself.

[desertt5]

I still have a Pentium 75 MHz chip in the drawer, slowest one ever made.

[Steve Viegas]

I thought Pentium started at 60MHz and 66MHz, but I could be wrong.

[jyl]

Total nostalgia/sentimental value thing. I realize that for the cost of the SSD I could buy a used netbook (heck, a new netbook) that would be about 100X the machine. Or an Android tablet. I'm a guy who has a drawerful of old RPN HP calculators, Newtons, HP200LX, blah blah, a slide rule, etc.