Getting some use out of a old Laptop.

So I have a AST J50 and was wondering if any one knows of any thing that I could do with this laptop. I have spent a few days trying to find stuff for this and some programs could work but I kind of kept running into the problem that it does not have a optical drive. I would really like to find some sort of purpose for this laptop.

Here are the specs on it.
133 Ghz processor
8MB ram
8GB hard Drive
14.4 Kbps modem
Floppy drive.
2 PC card slots
Little fuzzy on what else the ports are on it since it is not sitting right here in front of me. So I don't know what could be done with this so up for some suggestions on it.

 

What you can do with it is limited without a way to install anything. At the least, you have to take the hard drive out and connect it to another computer to copy files, but I've not seen anything about installing Linux that way. You'd have to search around or wait for someone who's done this to help you.

 

I believe Linux will work on that system due to resources that Linux uses, which is by far less than Windows. Even yet, you can run Knoppix Live or a comparable OpenWare Operating System.

I own an old Gateway laptop that did have Windows ME as the OS and a whopping 6Gig HD. I wiped the drive and I currently run Knoppix Live on it without any present issues.

Good Luck.

 

Zeppfan, the laptop in question doesn't have a CD or DVD drive. Considering its age, I doubt it supports booting from USB which rules out an external drive or a flash drive.

How would you run a Linux LiveCD distribution on this system?

 

I have windows 95 on the computer. I looked up Knoppix but like some one said the problem would be getting it on the computer. From some of the things I looked up I could get a USB to work on there with a PC card but the problem is I need to one update windows 95 some how or put a different OS on the computer so that I can have the drivers to use a flash drive or something.

 

DoubleHelix

I apologize for missing that detail.

I guess an ISO Image would be out of the question as well. If a CD-ROM could be installed, then by entering BIOS and changing boot order would accomplish installing Knoppix Live, right? What do you think?

 

get a usb optical drive for it

 

A USB optical drive will only work if the computer either supports booting from a USB drive (doubtful for a computer this old) or if DOS or other boot drivers for that optical drive can be loaded.