Sample old laptops that work with Puppy?

geercom · 08-31-2007, 01:36 PM

I want to find the best old laptop that will work well with Puppy, i.e., have all the following features work and work really fast!

E-mail with attachments
Web surfing
Word processing
Image viewing
Wi-Fi and/or broadband wireless from a mobile phone provider

I basically want to pick up a good used laptop for $100 that still works and will easily support all this and doing it with Puppy installed on the HDD.

Any suggestions for make and model laptops that you know will do it?

SilentSam · 09-01-2007, 04:02 AM

I don't have a laptop, but these hardware guidelines might be helpful:

P3 733MHz, 160mb SDRAM is LIGHTNING fast with puppy.

Cogar · 09-01-2007, 06:24 AM

Puppy should work well with pretty much any laptop out there built in 2001 or later--the only concern would be the chipset used for the wireless card. Puppy is very good at setting up wireless, but the wireless card needs to use a chipset (Atheros, etc.) for which good quality Linux drivers are available.

Note: for a HDD install, you want the RAM to be ~256MB or better.

southeast side · 09-07-2007, 07:45 AM

Can't speak to wireless cuz I don't use it, but everything else you mentioned works just fine on my Dell Latitude laptop with the following: 400 MHz P2; 128 MB RAM (with 256 MB swap partition); 6 GB HDD; NeoMagic graphics card

SirDuncan · 10-03-2007, 11:36 AM

The oldest laptop I have it working on is a Gateway 2000 Solo, P133 with 128mb RAM.

It also works on most IBM Thinkpads (the T60 is the only one I have tried where it didn't work).

DavidTangye · 10-11-2007, 07:11 PM

I have version 2.17 running on a Toshiba 1800, 900mHz, 512mB RAM. Its quite fast, and certainly a lot faster than Ubuntu on there.

Ricky2004 · 10-15-2007, 07:18 AM

I'm running 2.17 on a PII 266 MHz with 196 MB of RAM and a 2 GB drive, Wi-Fi by a Linksys USB antenna...

d4ndy · 11-10-2007, 09:22 AM

I've got 2.14 installed on the hard drive of a 765D Thinkpad (Pentium MMX 155 MHz 3GB HDD 64MB RAM 512MB swap partition). It works well, but I haven't been able to get the MWave sound and modem going, despite a rather complicated (for me) ritual involving the Smart Boot Manager, LILO, and autoexec.bat on a tiny DOS partition (supposedly) loading DOS MWave drivers. MWave seems to quite a hurdle for Linux, even with the (abandoned?) modules out there, but I continue to dink around with it.

osat3ch · 11-14-2007, 11:28 AM

I'm running it on a Compaq Armada e500:
500mhz
128M of RAM

alsa and networking are operational and the desktop looks nice at 1024X768
Puppy on this computer is faster than XP on a computer that can run XP.

merijnv · 12-12-2007, 09:53 AM

Have used puppy for a year on a Compaq Armada with 400MHz P3, 256Mb RAM, dying harddisk(*), usb-stick as storage.

(*) Always booted puppy from CDROM, using an USB-Stick as storage, the harddrive reported "iminent failure, press F1 to ignore" every time the machine booted. To let the harddrive rest in it's last days, I added to the rc.local:
hdparm -S6 /dev/hda
So the drive went to sleep 30s after it's last use. It was in use as swapping device, but swapping doesn't happen often with 256Mb storage.