First post, by xjas
- Rank
- l33t
Thought I'd put this challenge out to you guys, just for fun. If you're going on a trip somewhere, grab a retro laptop instead of your daily-driver and post back here on your experience.
I'll start - just got back from a few days of amazing skiing up in the mountains. I took my Thinkpad i1460 that I just finished setting up. Celeron 433, 384MB RAM, Win 98SE, 800x600 screen. Surprisingly it even still runs for 20 minutes on the battery. What I did with it:
Games - didn't spend much time gaming, but I did get a couple maps into Jazz Jackrabbit 2. My friend's daughter tried Skyroads but it was too hard for her.
Work - pounded out some words on that classic Thinkpad keyboard. I was just writing text so I didn't need my whole dev environment (Octave/Matlab+Python); QEdit for DOS did the job fine in this case. I was able to open most of the scientific papers I needed for reference with the creaky old Acrobat Reader (6.0??) that was already installed.
Music - played some CDs using the front panel CD player, and some tracker+mp3 tunes with DMP & XMPlay. The built-in speakers are better than my 2012 Macbook Pro, but that's not a high bar to pass.
Photo editing - got a few photos off my phone & resized/edited them to email using Photoshop 7. Yes, you can connect an Android phone to Win98SE if you have USB mass storage drivers installed. It's really flakey, but it does work. Pulling 3-4 MB images over USB1.1 sucks though.
Navigation - I saved directions to my rental condo in a text file on the desktop. Reading them in the car did involve plugging it into a cigarette-lighter power inverter, but I've had worse first-world problems than that. 😜
Surfing/email - I will admit, I didn't do this on the Thinkpad. It should theoretically be able to run Opera 12 for at least a sort-of-modern browsing experience, but I doubt it would be much fun and I haven't tried to set up a wifi card on it. In this case I used the solution I already had that works - my phone.
So yeah, I basically did everything I needed to on a 19-year-old laptop; I'd call that a success! Let's hear from you. 😀
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