# Old labtop salvage



## IITMocker (Feb 6, 2004)

I have an old labtop...a Compaq I purchased in 1998 (ancient right?). It's working fine (except for the battery, but that's a different story). 

I have a crazy idea that I want to upgrade the parts/software for this labtop. So I have several questions 

1) How hard woud it be for me to put in more memory (or replace the current memory card), add more RAM, maybe even change the motherboard? (I want to spend about $400 total, depending on what i can get for the various parts). 

2) How about upgrading operating system? I think it's running Windows 98 or something like that (I might be wrong here). IS it worth it to upgrade it to XP? 

2) It sounded like i wanted to change everything right? Is it possible to build a laptop from scratch? I know that it will be harder than building a regular computer because of the space issue, but what else do I have to watch out for?

3) I know that it's cheaper and easier, probably, to just go out and buy a new labtop but I like the look and design of the case of this one. I don't want to get rid of it unless I absolute have to. In the event that I do, does anyone even recycle or take old labtop anymore?


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## JohnWill (Oct 19, 2002)

Changing the MB is out of the question! Memory should be doable, depending on the specifics of the current memory. I suspect a 1998 Compaq would really labor with XP, I'd stick with W98.

Build a laptop from scratch? I guess anything is possible, but it sure isn't practical! I think an 8 year old laptop is well past it's prime. You're trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, I suggest you bite the bullet and move on.


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## john1 (Nov 25, 2000)

Hi IITMocker,

I have some old Compaq laptops that i rather like even though they are
old and slow. "Compaq 4-75", 75 M/c, not much ram, 32 Megs i think.

The early Compaq machines had most of the BIOS on their hard drive,
in a small partition called 'Diagnostics' i think. So you have to be
aware of that if you are thinking of running F-disk, it will show up
as a small partition. If this partition gets rubbed out, you will have
to download a copy from Compaq to put back on.

They were made when Win95 was the in thing, but i found that the IE
browser they came with would not display quite a lot of the newer
HTML pages, exactly why i am not sure, i think small changes have been
made to the HTML instructions which are simply not recognised by the
older browsers.
Looking to find a newer browser to display more pages properly, i
found that there are not many browsers that will run with only 32 Megs
of ram. I only found one which would work ... 'K-meleon'
I was very pleased with it as i can now use those little old laptops
for almost all web pages, still can't seem to get 'frames' to work.

I also installed '98-Lite' on one of them, it works very well, and
surprisingly fast for an old 75 meg machine running 'K-meleon'

It is unlikely that an old Compaq laptop would meet the minimum req
for WinXP, or for 2000/2000pro, although you haven't mentioned the
model of the one you have, or any details.

John


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## Wino (Dec 1, 2001)

I've got an old 1277 Compaq laptop, 6GB HDD 4200RPM, PII 450. Upgraded memory to 192 (-6 for video). Ran slower than molasses in winter with the original Compaq set up. Formatted and installed clean W98SE without the Compaq recovery partition. Ran much better, but still slow. Replaced HDD with 20GB 5400 RPM, still slow. Did a clean install of XP, now I can shower, shave, dress and cook breakfast while it boots...........did I mention slow? Next step is to reformat and install ubuntu linux..........got no where to go but up. If linux doesn't speed things up, it will become an oversized paper weight or a really ugly door stop. Wish I'd sold the darn thing 5-yrs ago when i could have gotten some of my money back.............now would only give it to someone I dislike immensely.


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