Thinkpads Forum

I have an old 600E fitted with a 12Gb hard disc and 128Mb SODIMM. I don't want to spend any more money buying or upgrading the hardware, or buying a later operating system. It used to run Win XP very well but this is now on my T22.

I have a choice of installing NT4 workstation including the 6a upgrade, Win 98SE or Win Me. What do other users recommend when installing from scratch? My preference would probably be to install Win Me as it's the latest op system available to me, but I'm open to suggestions. I would like to be able to use the internal dial-up modem, a CD-RW drive (for which I could use Roxio Media creator version 6 or 7), connect to a network using a PCMCIA ethernet card and maybe use USB 2 from a PCMCIA card as well. It's currently running NT 4 in 2 NTFS partitions but this does now seem very old fashioned.

Regards,

Garth.

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showforum=91

I'd go for 98SE and building a nice system out of the updates at that site. I personally host for the 98SE Autopatcher and have used several of these things, so I vouch for the 98SE option over others.

Another option I've thought of since is installing Linux but I have no experience of this at all. However it would be an interesting exercise if possible. Do others know if appropriate Linux drivers are avaailable for the 600E, particularly for the screen, mouse, PCMCIA cards, USB CD drive etc? What distribution would you recommend - it would need to fit onto CD ROMS as I don't have a DVD drive available to fit the Ultrabay. Would 12 GB and 128 Mb be sufficient?

NT is solid But it doesn't support USB.
I did use ME for a long time ... I didn't really have major problems with it.

I went from 95 to ME on the desktop and so I cannot give any comment on the merits of 98.

If you have licenses for both then I would go with the ME.

Where (apart from Ebay) can you get 98 licenses?

Linux will work great on that machine... except for perhaps your modem. But you can find cheap PCMCIA modems that will work for next to nothing. (The modem MAY work, but I haven't tried to get them to work with Linux.)

12GB disk is fine. With 32MB built-in and 128MB RAM you've got 160MB? Or you have 128MB total. Either way, more memory will help with every OS on this machine. You can add two 256MB low-density PC100 SO-DIMMs and have 544MB total.

If you like Windows, Me may be your best bet, as your modem will certainly work with that. But if you want to give Linux a try, I suggest Ubuntu (even though I'm a Fedora fan), or perhaps Xubuntu which uses less RAM for its desktop manager. PC Cards, CD drive, USB CD, TrackPoint, sound and video will all work with just about any version of Linux.

If you want windows, I would say Win98SE HANDS DOWN. IMHO, WinME was the worst OS that Microsoft ever made. I have never seen someone running it locally that didn't have problems with blue screens or other errors. Win98SE is a very solid OS.

If you want to try Linux, I have tried and liked Red Hat 9.0 (a predecessor to Fedora), but would recommend 6.0-8.0, since you only have 128MB ram. There was a work around to get the audio working. I still have a link for it if you need it. EDIT: Here is the link.

Another version of Linux that I might recommend, but I haven't tried it on a 600E, is Puppy Linux. I've used this to test out several systems when I didn't have hard drives, since it is so small and will run from a CD in the Live version. I really liked it.

I would not recommend Red Hat Linux, as it is no longer maintained and has known security issues. (Just like old versions of Windows.) Use something current and updated, such as Puppy Linux or [censored] Small Linux if you want something really small. Laptop support in general has also progressed a long way since RedHat Linux days.

Ubuntu and Fedora both use Gnome Desktop by default, which is a memory hog, but both can also use XFCE desktop which takes less RAM (and is the default in Xubuntu), and they can also use even smaller desktop managers like Blackbox. Turn off the default services you won't use, and even the big distributions can be pretty lean, and they have much larger support communities.

Thanks for all your advice. I've decided to go for Puppy Linux as it is supposed to work from a CD so should give me an idea whether the 600E hardware would be OK.

I've never played with Linux at all (but have used all versions of Windows from version 2.0 on except for Vista (and all versions of MS-DOS from 3.0, DR-DOS, Radio Shack TRS-DOS, QDOS, and CPM on an Apple II, with a smattering of UNIX) but it seems to be gaining in popularity. There's no essential data on the HD so it can be repartitioned and reformatted if needed.

My 600E is just really now for playing about with as my T22 is my daily notebook, along with a fairly high spec AMD duo-core desktop and an AMD XP 2000 desktop, both self-built, both with XP. I've also got my 25-year-old Sinclair Spectrum in the loft but I don't think it would run Microsoft Office!

The 600E with Linux can (hopefully) connect to the internet via a PCMCIA network card (CNet CNF401) which works OK in NT, XP and 98SE. If the internal modem doesn't work it doesn't really matter. I'll let you know how I get on. If needed I can get another 128Mb SODIMM really cheaply but I will be interested to see if it can work with the 128Mb (+ 32 Mb base memory of course).

Regards,

Garth.

I've written a little about the 600E and some of it's capabilities. You can check the posts out at the following links:

http://www.blog.savant.be/computers/mis ... e-info/39/
http://www.blog.savant.be/computers/ubu ... 45-57u/15/

Not too hard to install Ubuntu on the machines. I suggest you install Ubuntu but customize the install to contain something smaller than XFCE, perhaps IceWM, and whittle down the apps to more barebones, but still working, tools. I made a nice list of things as well at the following link:

http://www.blog.savant.be/computers/swe ... ations/94/

Good luck with whatever you choose.

I've now installed Win 98SE and Puppy Linux 3.01 (full install to the HD) on my 600E, dual-booting using GRUB. It seems to be fairly fast with Puppy although I've managed to crash it a few times and have had to re-install from the CD, albeit fairly painlessly. Most of the hardware has been detected OK and I've installed my PCMCIA network card using a Realtek driver although the card is badged CNET.

I've partitioned the hard disc into 4 partitions as recommended by the Puppy manual:
1) FAT32 for Win 98SE
2) Puppy Linux
3) swap drive for Linux
4) FAT32 for shared Win/Linux data

I've also found another 32 Mb SODIMM which I had forgotten about, bringing the total to 192 Mb usable RAM.

compatibility, speed, and reliability are the three things to strive for.
98 se is by far the fastest O/S to use on this machine,
is 10 years old, and still going strong. all updates are still avalable, and if you want a modern web browser, you can put
firefox in it. you can also shut down windows and go directly into dos, and play all those ainchent dos games like red neck rampage, or duke nukem. (somthing ME cant do). if you want reliability, go for xp pro service pac 1.
it has usb 2 support, and virtually all the sp2 patches are avalable
for sp1 if you dont want to update to sp 2.
i really dont like sp2,
its too much like vista, always looking out for you (and microsoft)
even if you dont want it too, and hogging all your resorces along the way. your only problem is that you really need a minumum
of 192 megs to run (64 megs will work, but be inpossibility slow,
128 megs will work, but be slow, 192 megs is ok, 256 megs
is good, and anything over that is great!!
you can also install xp and 98 in a dual boot configuration,
but youl need a large drive to get the most out of it. just
partition 1/2 the drive into fat 32, install windows 98 on it.
and then do a "full unstall" (not upgrade) and specify you want
it installed in the empy partition. xp has its own built in boot manager. its my favorite set up. adrian

I'm running 98Lite - solid as a rock, not a single crash in several months and more than fast enough for anything I throw at it.
No plans on changing - very happy.
Colin

The lightweight Linux Ubuntu distro Xubuntu would be ideal for this machine.
Use 7.10 i386 alternative and make sure the 600E is installed with at least 64Mb of memory.

The links to Savant's site look very useful too and the switches he specifies for the install are advised - thanks for that M8!

I'm awaiting more memory for a 600E I got off Ebay and will report back on how the installation went, and provide a list of networking and wireless components / changes / upgrades etc.

Keep us posted, Nick.

I've got a 600E with 196MB RAM running XP rather well, but would certainly like to try this.

Joe

Hi Joe

I've not forgotten to post here - I'm awaiting a mains adaptor for the 600E.

Very interesting about it running on XP - I would have thought that it would not have enough grunt to do that.

I'll get back to you here in due course and thanks for reminding me.