Breathing life back into my old laptop...

[JoLLyRoGer]

so I've got an old Compaq 2199US notebook that I bought a long time ago which ran for many years until the hard drive finally gave out. Not to mention that the battery is worn out too and only lasts for about 5 minutes now. That's when I decided to build the desktop PC listed in my sig.

Now I'm thinking about breathing some new life into the old lappy just to I can sit in my easy chair and casually surf the web over the wireless link while I'm watching TV.

I found parts on newegg that will cost me a total of $102.89 to replace the old Segate Momentus 40GB HDD with a new 160GB model plus an additional 512MB of DDR266 ram for a total of 1GB. And I found a place that will sell me a new battery for $42.95.

So basically $100.00 to bring my old laptop back with 4x the storage and double the ram or $150.00 if I want to do all of this and replace the battery as well.

Is it worth it or is there a better mobile computing platform I can get for $150.00?

Thanks,
JR..

 

[programmer]

I don't think you'll do better than that for web surfing. You could save a few $ by getting a smaller HD. You don't need 160GB for simple internet access. At newegg, a Seagate Momentus 80GB 5400.3 HD is $60 with free shipping (120GB for $15 more with shipping). And for kicks, you might want to install Ubuntu instead of Windows. It might run a browser faster and you wouldn't have to worry about an AV app hogging resources.

 

[JoLLyRoGer]

Originally posted by: programmer
I don't think you'll do better than that for web surfing. You could save a few $ by getting a smaller HD. You don't need 160GB for simple internet access. At newegg, a Seagate Momentus 80GB 5400.3 HD is $60 with free shipping (120GB for $15 more with shipping). And for kicks, you might want to install Ubuntu instead of Windows. It might run a browser faster and you wouldn't have to worry about an AV app hogging resources.

Thanks for the sanity check! Good point about going the 80GB route that would save me $25.00 and offset some of the cost of a new battery.

As far a Ubuntu goes, that's not a bad idea at all. I was running SuSE 10.0 before the HDD crash so I'll probably load another *nix on it. For that matter, I've been itching to play around with PCLinux OS too. I've heard good things about it and Beryl looks bad ass!