My memory is improving

[andrewducker]

I gave Lilian my old CRT television when I got my flatscreen.
And in return she gave me her old laptop.

It's a Dell Latitude C600 - a Pentium III with 128MB of RAM. Apparently its selling point was $2486 when it was first released.

Anyway, it's got Win2K on it, which I can live with - especially considering the low levels of RAM. However, even with a reasonably lightweight OS on it, swapping between applications was a grind - it couldn't hold both Firefox and Thunderbird in RAM at the same time, so swap got pretty bad.

Checking online though, I could treble the amount of RAM for £25. So I popped to the Crucial Memory site, downloaded their memory checker, bought the stuff it recommended, and it arrived in the post today. Three minutes with a screwdriver took off the back plate, the memory slotted right in, and sure enough it all works much more smoothly now.

It's not as portable as the Eee, and I don't think I'd bother dragging it to places. But as a machine to use in the living room it's going to be very handy.

I am tempted to install Linux on it - but frankly it all _works_ right now, and I'm not sure what I'd gain (other than geek points, that is).

Comments

[poisonduk.livejournal.com]

Funnily enough I'm currently sorting out a clunky family PC and was considering using the crucial memory manager thing to get more Ram for it too.

[andrewducker]

It's very neat. Well worth using.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

It is VERY far from your living room to your bedroom. Or to your other laptop. Or your DS. Or your Wii. Or your phone.

:-D

You just love the technology, you do.

[andrewducker]

The living room is a _different room_, which makes it hard to sit in the same room as Ed while he reads a book. The DS and Wii both suck as browsers/email/IM clients.

The Eee is pretty good - and I wouldn't go out and buy a whole new laptop while I have it. But for free, this is nicer - what with the larger screen and bigger keyboard.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

If he's reading a book, he's labouring under some kind of twencen meatspace delusions of retrochic hardcopy.

Get your katana and slap him around with some nuyen until he gets with the future, chummer.

[andrewducker]

I just laughed. And Ed looked at me quizzically. And I was completely incapable of explaining what I was laughing at.

He's not actually reading a book right now though - he's playing Zelda on the DS.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

Even the act of taking the mickey out of cyberpunk cliches is curiously retro.

That feels weird. Surely mocking something for being retro in itself isn't retro? Although I did get called for using 50s slang at work :-p

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

I should have borrowed it back! I don't have a desktop here now and find my lovely little laptop gives me sore eyes for much work... I am also still kinda regreting that Eeee I didn't buy for 150 on eBay...

[johanna-alice.livejournal.com]

How old is it?

I was very surprised when my ten year old iBook (once I'd upped the RAM from 32MB to 288MB!) turned out to be usefully fast. Its a G3 300 and is now running Tiger. Running Firefox and Mail together is no problem and I can even get GIMP going at a respectable speed.

Guess I'm saying Windoze is a bit shoddy :) Give it a go with Linux - I suspect matters will improve dramatically.

[andrewducker]

As I said above, it now _does_ run very respectably, since I increased the memory to 328MB...

[martling.livejournal.com]

Heh, I used that model for my entire university career. In fact I still have it, after I graduated and got a new one it spent the last three years in the TARDIS rack running the gliding club website. Reliable machine!

FWIW it does run Linux very nicely and the battery life is much better under Linux than Windows. The only thing I never quite got working was the IRDA port.

[martling.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I have a docking station for it sitting around. Quite nifty, it lets you add a PCI card and still run it off the normal AC adapter. Actually, maybe I should stick a SATA card in that and then use it as a silent desktop PC.

[andrewducker]

The only problem with the laptop is that the external fan has ceased to work, so the internal one runs overtime and it's quite loud... Not sure how to fix that though. Any ideas?

[martling.livejournal.com]

That may not be quite what's going on. There's two fans there, a small one on the back next to the PS/2 port which cools the graphics chip, and a larger one on the bottom in the corner which cools a heatsink connected to the CPU by a copper heatpipe. If the latter is the one you mean by "external fan", it may just not be on because the CPU hasn't got hot enough.

You can use i8kfanGUI to monitor the temperature and control the fans either automatically or manually.

[andrewducker]

Fantastic! Thanks!

So, the fan could be being noisy purely because it's got dirty, or whatever? Hmmm. I wonder how easy it is to crack open the case and oil the fan...

[martling.livejournal.com]

I don't recall either fan being particularly noisy so yeah, may just need fluff etc cleaned out. I don't think you want to introduce any oil though.

To get access to that lot you need to lift off the keyboard, which is released by the screws on the underside labelled K, and from there I think it's all reasonably obvious.

[andrewducker]

I ended up buying a floppy drive for the laptop so that I could update the BIOS, so that I could run the fan software.

And it turns out that neither of the fans is on 99% of the time - it's the hard drive which is making the whirring noise.

*sigh*