I've had this beat-up old M200 running WinXP for a long while now; about a year ago I thought it was ruined when my apartment flooded and it was on the floor, plugged in. The power supply was green when I got home.

But a few months later I decided, "make it work or throw it out" so I ordered a new power supply.
It fired right up and worked like a champ.

Now, it needed a new cmos battery anyway, so I ordered one, and am waiting to install it (because... fear of opening the laptop up with its swivel LCD hinge).
And I got a new battery for it; I have rarely had a laptop or notebook whose battery lasted more than a few minutes. The new one should last 3 whole hours!

Now, I've been considering a 2.0mhz cpu to replace the 1.6mhz pentium M, but I don't really want to soup it up. I upgraded the ram from 1 gb to 2 gb because Gimp was gawdawful slow on it. With 2 gb, Gimp is actually quite usable. But among other things I'd like to be able to run (some) DOS games and apps on it w/o using DOSBox. So I don't want too hot a cpu. Besides, the 32mb Go5200 gpu is going to be a speed bottleneck anyway.

It also has a 60gb HD, and I *think* it's an early sata drive. I would like to upgrade it to higher capacity. I've a 160gb drive from my old HP laptop that died, which I may just ghost my OS onto and use it, but 2 things come to mind; an SSD should be faster, quieter and more reliable, but... what capacity can winXP support? I think there have been 128gb SSDs, but the smallest I've commonly seen is 256gb... I would *really* like to stick a 256gb in this machine, as then it should be able to hold all my games, programs and data files I'll want to use on the machine, with plenty of storage for future.

So, does anyone know if a Toshiba Portege M200 can take an SSD, and what's the maximum size it's likely to be able to handle under WinXP?

Oh, another question springs to mind; with such a big drive, it might be nice to be able to dual-boot into Linux, as well. Is there a distro that can be burned to flash for installation, that will still work in such an old machine? (I don't have a cd rom for the laptop).