Reviving An Old Pentium Libretto
 

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.

Do they make an IDE SSD?

Yes. :)

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

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.

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...

Load Ubuntu 11.04 on it

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.