Long time readers here have seen more than one article about my quest to to breath life into an old Thinkpad 600E laptop that I have. It is a Pentium 2 with 288MB ram and a 6GB disk — and I think it still has a fair amount of life in it. I just struggle to find an OS that I love…
I’ve had Ubuntu / Xubuntu on it.
I’ve had Damn Small Linux on it.
I’ve dabbled with Zenwalk and Knoppix as well.
Last week I installed Mandriva to it, but I found that to be the same as the others. It was ok, but too sluggish even after experimenting with other window managers and killing off a few daemons.
Yesterday I tried Puppy Linux, but I have yet to stumble on the proper boot parameters to get it to actually boot without an immediate error (side note: It runs incredibly well on my Toshiba Tecra — even works with the ethernet adapter that the other distros can’t be bothered to support! Lots to like with Puppy, probably more on that later…)
A blinding flash of the obvious finally struck me:
At the end of the day, if you want a modern OS, you need modern hardware. Damn Small Linux makes this thing fly — but there ain’t much there…
So, following that logic, I decided I should install an old OS on the Thinkpad. After all, it ran pretty well back “in the day”. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a copy of RedHat 5 or 6 laying around… 
But I do have a few Windows 2000 licenses.
Windows 2000 runs great on this thing!
Now, Firefox is a bit sluggish, but quite tolerable. I’d love to find something like Swiftfox for the windows operating systems. Swiftfox offers optimized builds for your processor and I had pretty good luck with it when running Xubuntu. Anyone seen anything like that?
Next challenge is to find a light-weight anti-virus option… while I’d prefer to have an “on access” scanner, perhaps ClamWin might be a better choice for this machine.
And so the Thinkpad 600e saga continues…
Possibly Related posts:
September 2nd, 2007 
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There are a number of builds optimised for different Windows instruction sets at
http://www.tweakfirefox.com/builds.php
Bet one of them might be a little quicker?
Paul
Thanks for the link, Paul. Alas, the MMX one (which is pretty much all the Pentium II offers) is busted.
If I get really ambitious, I might just try and build it myself. Ok, really ambitious and kinda bored.
Ah ha!
http://www.vector64.com/WindowsBuilds.html
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