Got a working laptop again
A while back I bought two Tinkpad R51s for 8 bucks at a local thrift store I visit regularly. I was able t get one working system out of the two yet I had no power adapter. Well today I went to the same thrift store and the lady the runs the place asked me to the back. She bought a shipping crate of random cables and told me to look and see if there was anything I wanted before she sales it for copper scrap. Sure enough I found a Thinkpad charging adapter.
For giggles I'm installing windows 7 starter to see how it runs.
For giggles I'm installing windows 7 starter to see how it runs.
Comments
The video is the Intel 855GME for Intel Extreme Graphics 2 and I could only find a Windows XP driver. I would get a unsupported OS error when I would run the installer and couldn't get the drivers to install forcefully.
Drivers. MS don't do their own in house drivers whereas Linux tends to do their own shit.
Well Linux is pertained to the Open Source community and tons of people write code for older systems let alone when a system is supported it will be supported for many many years despite it being older then dirt such as this thinkpad released in 2004 and here we are in 2016. Mostly because the Kernel is only changed slightly and uses the value of "If it's not broken, don't fix it."
Why would Microsoft create drivers for a five year old video chipset let alone Intel doing so? Because they rather have people buy new hardware and do not want to waste money and resources on old hardware and rather work on new hardware. Reason being it costs a butt load to have a digitally signed product. Honestly MS's driver system sucks. It bitches and moans when it is not digitally signed, if it is a GPU and MS wrote the drivers for it, it will not run right for OpenGL/OpenCL let alone DirectX compatible. Just enough wiggle room to get out of 640x480 with 1bit of video.
I remember when Windows 7 came out MS claimed it would support tons and tons of hardware and even had a webpage that you could find if a certain part was compatible natively. Nine times out of ten it lied and you had to use older drivers from Vista and if 32bit from XP.
Granted I have seen MS lighten up a bit with Windows 8 and 10 and seen people run them on Pentium 4 systems but nine times out of ten their desktops and have a updated GPU.
I can go hours on this subject and point out flaws with MS and OEM companies. I can even toss out a flaws with Linux so don't think I'm just a Linux fanboy.
>Why would I want to use a bloated fork Debian distro such as Ubuntu when I can use the real deal that is a lot slimmer and more customization.
Ubuntu and Debian can be as slim as you want them to be - no one said you had to install the default desktop. Ubuntu's main advantages over Debian are PPAs, commercial repos, support (like RHEL) and faster mirror.
>Well Linux is pertained to the Open Source community and tons of people write code for older systems let alone when a system is supported it will be supported for many many years despite it being older then dirt such as this thinkpad released in 2004 and here we are in 2016. Mostly because the Kernel is only changed slightly and uses the value of "If it's not broken, don't fix it."
Not wrong.
>Why would Microsoft create drivers for a five year old video chipset let alone Intel doing so?
Because you have to, to get it working. Or they just include the drivers Intel wrote years ago. They'll usually still work. (Remember: Windows has good driver ABI backwards-compatibility, Linux makes 0 guarantees.)
>Because they rather have people buy new hardware and do not want to waste money and resources on old hardware and rather work on new hardware.
Intel would - Microsoft sells Windows on shelves, and people expect it to work on their *-year old computers.
>Reason being it costs a butt load to have a digitally signed product.
Not much more than the cost to make the hardware.
>Honestly MS's driver system sucks. It bitches and moans when it is not digitally signed,
Because drivers are serious shit - if malware gets into there, game over man. As such, 32-bit Windows will complain and 64-bit Windows will refuse unless you forcibly disable it at boot-time.
>if it is a GPU and MS wrote the drivers for it, it will not run right for OpenGL/OpenCL let alone DirectX compatible. Just enough wiggle room to get out of 640x480 with 1bit of video.
Eh, haven't had any trouble with MS drivers. Nowadays MS just ships the OEM's instead, and it works.
>I remember when Windows 7 came out MS claimed it would support tons and tons of hardware and even had a webpage that you could find if a certain part was compatible natively. Nine times out of ten it lied and you had to use older drivers from Vista and if 32bit from XP.
And a lot of those Vista drivers were from XP. That's just to cover MS' ass - they won't support it and probably neither will the OEM, but the driver will work.
>Granted I have seen MS lighten up a bit with Windows 8 and 10 and seen people run them on Pentium 4 systems but nine times out of ten their desktops and have a updated GPU.
Yeah, desktops are easy, especially if you upgrade to a WDDM supported GPU. Windows 7 ran well on my P3 with a newer GPU, so no reason why 8 wouldn't run well on P4. With 8, MS dropped support for XP-style drivers, so you'll be stuck running 7 on such pre-GMA950 HW if you can't upgrade the GPU on a laptop.
I'm curious, what AGP or PCI graphics card in such an old system would actually work with Windows 7?
Doesn't Windows 8 require instructions that the P4 doesn't have?
I never used debian, but it's kind of heading down a dark path with systemd. I'm more of a Slackware guy, but the inclusion of pulseaudio in the next version worrys me.
Radeon X1650, because AGP 4X. I also used a 9800XT, which is also supported. Even then, you can likely massage XP or Vista drivers on it.
>Doesn't Windows 8 require instructions that the P4 doesn't have?
Prescott P4 or better.
> I never used debian, but it's kind of heading down a dark path with systemd. I'm more of a Slackware guy, but the inclusion of pulseaudio in the next version worrys me.
From my experience, Pulse just works nowadays. Ubuntu just shipped early, buggy versions years ago and people never forgave it. Most people who don't like systemd don't actually know much about it and parrot an uninformed viewpoint of fear powered by Dunning-Kruger.
Ok
I thought even Prescottseven lacked certain instructions. Well maybe it will run fine with 8, but I know it won't run with 8.1 or 10.
Still doesn't change the fact that both are actually pretty bad. Debian implementing pre-alpha (as in quality) systemd actually kind of goes against their ways of how they normally do things and the fact they didn't listen to the users is kind of telling that something is up.
Nope, they'll run 10 fine too. I have a Pentium D and it runs 10 absolutely fine.
>Still doesn't change the fact that both are actually pretty bad. Debian implementing pre-alpha (as in quality) systemd actually kind of goes against their ways of how they normally do things and the fact they didn't listen to the users is kind of telling that something is up.
Funny, because I have some servers on Jessie and systemd is trouble-free. The only trouble I've had was a crap unit file shipped by a third-party packager. I used Pulse back in 2008 and had absolutely no troubles with it.
"Unix philosophy" is a poor argument that means whatever it wants to, to different people, and modern Unix systems have barely reflected it anyways. (See: X11, SSH, GNU everything, etc.) systemd reflects a change in the Linux landscape anyways. (This is an argument for a separate thread.) Users don't care what their init is, as long as the system is fast and reliable.
For nVidia. You can use a Geforce FX 5xxx or newer on Windows 7. Those series of video cards were available in AGP and PCI. I have a Geforce 7800 GS AGP card in my Athlon 64 Build. It works perfectly on Windows Vista and 7. It even works with Aero.
Only the 32-bit versions of 8.1 and 10 will work on a Prescott Pentium 4 and Pentium D (And early AMD64 CPUs) because those lack CMPXCHG16b which is required for the 64-bit versions. Hence why you get an incompatibility issue with the GWX update when running Windows 7 64-bit on those CPUs.
Who cares if the so called Ubuntu mirrors are "faster" If speed of retrieving a one megabyte package was so precious I would create my own local mirror. Most professional IT admins do that for security reasons let alone add their own packages and scripts.
When you install Ubuntu you have to use Unity until you change out the GUI to KDE or GNONE to name a couple.
If say I wanted to slap together a dedicated gaming server for a LAN party and we were to play say DayZ. the only system I had for that job was a Core2Duo with 1GB of ram. Well if I wanted to do it properly and to lessen "lag" with that hardware I wouldn't want waste resources such as having X running in the background. I would want a simple neat CLI system with at most a SQL server with the dedicated server software for that game.
Hell if I wanted let alone insane enough I could install Debian on a 486. I can install Debian on embedded devices that are compatible or a custom compiled kernel.
I am just just getting sick and tired of you younger kids that attend to think "I know everything" Hell I've forgotten more then most of you will ever learn. Yea you can load up a VM and toss on DOS and Win3.x and say "Yea, I've used it" but you never really used it to a day to day. Connecting to the web in the 90s with a 14.4k or 32k dial-up modem and having to deal with HTTP or Gopher protocols. Going by the word of mouth about a kick ass BBS that had the latest shareware games. Deciding to trash Windows so you had enough disk space for DOOM and having to face the parents when they find out. Hell I bet none of you had to learn Basic Bet no one under the age of twenty-four can tell me what 74 logic or 4000 series is with out googling it. The war between Token Ring and Ethernet. Getting a new game and finding out it's for SuperVGA only and your system only does VGA. Or getting a new game and finding out its sound output is only for Roland or PC-Speaker and all you have is a Gravis UltraSound.
In other words
01100110 01110101 01100011 01101011 00100000 01101111 01100110 01100110
This is why Ubuntu Server exists... all the ease of Ubuntu, none of the bloat. I've run Ubuntu servers on 1 GB and it's plenty.
Fuck you.