Opinions...what to do with old ass laptop

Right now I have an old laptop that a co-worker has given to me so that I can upgrade the memory and fix/replace the power cord. No big deal. There's something her husband needs to install that requires more than the 40 mb of memory it's got. It's a Dell LM series TG30S, which is a Pentium 166 MMX laptop that originally came with 8 MB (!) of memory but was upgraded to 40. So yeah, this thing is pretty archaic.

As I was suspecting, the proprietary memory is expensive as well. I can max out the memory to 72 MB, but it will cost $80. Or... I can actually buy another laptop identical to this, but with the memory upgrade already installed for about $75.

So I was thinking, cool, I can buy the laptop, swap the memory, and I'll have a working 166 mhz laptop with 40 megs of ram! But what the hell can you actually do with such an old laptop? I'm drawing a blank here. Can anyone think of any reason why I might actually do this? Would it be possible to run some old version of Linux and squeeze something useful out of it? Or just attack it with a dremel? Heh.

could harvest the thing and make a digital picture frame if you want

My first computer was a 166 MMX. It played Diablo just fine. Also ran Nesticle and other DOS emulators decently, but you have to boot into DOS to get the most out of it. Classic PnC adventure games should run great on it. Web-browsing capabilities are okay, but you're stuck with IE and anything with Flash in it will bring it to its knees.

Then again, I had 128MB of ram in mine and a mid-ranged vid card for the time (Voodoo 3). I honestly don't think it's worth having, unless you want to turn it into a Sierra/Lucasarts/Icom box.

You know, loading it with DOS (or at least set it up to have a good DOS boot disk) isn't a bad idea. I have several old games that would work well with it as they don't require 3D acceleration. I'd just need to find some way of using a gamepad with it since it doesn't have a gameport or a USB port. I have a flight stick that uses the serial port that would work in some of the games.

Yep. If you don't have an old dedicated desktop with 3D acceleration, using this as a DOS-only (or *maybe* 95 with DOS dual boot) gaming rig is the best thing you could do with it. That'd elimainte all those programs like CLI2NOP and VDMSound, etc. Only thing is what kind of audio chip is in there. Hopefully somethnig vrey close to a SB.

Has anyone ever used Damn Small Linux (DSL)? I was just checking it out, and it seems it can run an entire system (stripped of course) from a 50 megabyte disc, with barebones utilities like a basic music player, word processing, net browsing, etc. Apparently it would "fly" on a system as fast as a 166. I'd need to brush up on my Linux, though. I haven't used it in years.

From the Sound Off forum this thread is listed as:

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Opinions...what to do with old ass...
by Joust Williams

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Where is the granny porn? I'm disappointed.

I'm telling you make a digital picture frame, if the screen is good enough (at least able to put out 16bit colour) you can set it up with some sort of an operating system (linux would be pretty useful here, you could set an image rotating program up to run off the init) that automatically boots up a slideshow of images given from a certain source -- be it over ethernet, some form of memory card, hard drive, whatever.

Ah, but my relatives are quite ugly. I could set it to a slideshow of porn though. That would be awesome, especially when my girlfriend's grandma comes by.

On a side note, Damn Small Linux is pretty cool. Basically the whole install file is 50 megs. You can put it on a USB flash drive or bootable CD rom, stick it in the computer and boot up to a fully functional (if not somewhat stripped) Debian Linux OS, complete with most of the basic apps you need. And you can load it entirely into ram. I don't see myself actually using it for anything but old ass computers (it will run on a 486) but it's a pretty neat way for a noob to learn a little about Linux without worrying about messing with partitions and dual booting. Now if I only remembered how to use Linux.

One thing me and my Dad do with old laptops is use them for GPS/mapping systems for long trips. I think all you need is an old copy of street Atlas and a gps thing.

It can take a lot of frustration out of navigation on trips.