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Old Window 3.x Notebook, junk or antique?

18 years ago

I have an old 1995 or thereabouts, notebook, an AT&T/NCE Safari 3181, that I'm getting ready to put in electronic recycle. It has the old DoS 640K base memory limitation, not sure why Windows doesn't boot, guess this comes up as part of the BIOS. The machine has a total RAM of 11 Mbytes, ha!! and a 120 MByte HDD. Is this junk or an antique?

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Comments (4)

mikie_gw
18 years ago
Might leave it on the ac adapter overnight to charge up the cmos battery. Maybe then you can play with win3.1 . Some notebooks need the battery installed before the cmos charges.
ravencajun Zone 8b TX
18 years ago
wow I am not sure if that would even run the super small versions of linux. It does probably need a new cmos battery if it has never been replaced, but I am not real familiar with the cmos in laptops.
IF you can get it up you might look at the linux distro called damn small linux to see if it would work on that set up, it is small not sure the specs for it though.
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
Hum I don't think it would work.
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DA_Mccoy
18 years ago
Jerry,

I feel your pain.

Just this week I "saved" a NEC laptop from the big beyond. It's not as antiquated as yours though. It's a P2 233 Win2000 Professional with 10GB H/D and 64MB memory. The cmos battery is weak and the rechargable battery won't hold a charge.

I stripped everything off of it but Office. I installed Firefox, Avast, and an old Kerio firewall I had circa 2004. I also added Foxit, CCleaner, WinPatrol, Belarc and Spybot.

It actually works, but it is so dog slow.

I did some surfing and found a 128MB stick of RAM available for $100.00. To replace the battery would cost another $80.00. I just can't see putting that kind of money into the unit.

I really don't know what I am going to do with it. It has been fun to tinker with though.

DA
jerry_nj
Original Author
18 years ago
Yes, my interest is more sentimental than technical. I also have my just previous HP Notebook, it had an HDD crash. I installed a new larger HDD and re-installed Windows XP and Linux SuSe. Both work fine, and share the 80 GByte HDD, partitioned into two equal drives.

I still have my first PC, and Commadore (Spelling?) 64, that's right it has 64K of RAM, and a floppy disk. It worked great on DoS, amaizing what can be done when the OS is simple. I then purchased a desktop, AT&T again, that had dual floppy drives, but no HDD. I'd guess it had 128K RAM. It had MS Word for DoS and worked great, windows came later.

I don't plan on spending any money on the subject Laptop. The battery indicator shows full charge, but I'd bet the capacity of the battery is way down, this has sat on the shelf for at least 10 years.

Well the good news form the point-of-view of my basement, I got rid of two large old fashioned TVs, a Microwave, an old computer CRT, three printers...so now there's room to keep the old Safari notebook for a bit longer.

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