clm1919 wrote: ↑Wed Jul 17, 2024 3:33 pm
I sometimes worry that my flippant and sarcastic wit will offend - glad to know it's tolerated/appreciated here.
I'm trying to "have fun" with this project - it keeps me from getting arrested from throwing computers from a 5th floor appartment in frustration....
@clm1919 :-
Nah, don't worry about that......I doubt ya COULD offend this lot! We like folks with a sense of humour; let's face it, for most of us, using Puppy is all about having fun anyway.......so if ya can have a laugh while you're at it, why not? As wizard says, half the fun for us here is in making something useful & functional out of equipment that others would've hurled into the landfill years ago...and 'our Pup' is perfect for doing that.
My old 2002 Inspiron 1100 lappie was a case in point:-
Weighing nearly 8 lbs - you wouldn't want to lug it around very far, or else you'd end up with arms twice the length they should be! - this 'beast' came with a 2.2 GHz 'NetBurst' Celery-stick, just 128 MB of RAM and a miniscule 20 GB HDD when we bought it all those years ago. To this day, I will never comprehend how the hell it managed to run XP 'Home'.....but it did; just.....somehow. It thrashed the poor wee HDD mercilessly, but in those days I wasn't that tech-savvy & mostly just kept my fingers crossed..... 
I'll give those old 'NetBurst' Intels one thing; the hotter they got, the better they seemed to like it. The buggers were near as dammit indestructible!
I upgraded the hell out of the thing. I maxed the RAM to a full 2 GB, following advice from an Intel 'white paper' I tracked down on the 82845 chipset. The Celery-stick got the bum's rush in favour of a 2.6 GHz 'proper' Pentium 4 (all of GBP £5 off eBay); in those days Dell weren't yet using 'mobile' chips, so even their laptops used full desktop CPUs. It did mean it was a breeze to swap CPUs, though. The HDD got swapped-out, initially for a 32GB Transcend PATA-interface SSD; 6 months later, I upgraded to a 64GB unit. This made a BIG difference to Puppy's boot times, though it couldn't do much about operating speed due to being stuck with 400 MHz DDR1 RAM. And the P4s really weren't all they were cracked up to be; talk about slowww......watching paint dry was more entertaining! But, at the time, we all thought they were fantastic chips....
I added a couple of early-gen SanDisk USB 3.0 Ultra 'Fit' nano-sized thumb drives as permanently plugged-in 'external' storage; these worked fine.....the USB 3.0 interface was backwards-compatible with the Inspiron's USB 2.0 ports (this was one of the very first machines on the market to take advantage of the then newly-introduced USB 2.0 standard. Some manufacturers wouldn't get around to this for another 4 yrs or so). Yah, it occupied both USB ports, but despite having no built-in wifi (unlike its 'big brother', the 5100), I got around that with a brand-new, old-stock 'period' NetGear CardBus wifi adapter; Dell were good enough to supply a CardBus slot in all their machines, a trait that would continue for nearly another decade after that.
Running Puppy full-time from 2014 onwards, it transformed the beast from an under-performing slug to a frankly quite sprightly athlete. (Well, as sprightly as a P4 could ever be expected to get, that is...) 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
She gave me another 8 yrs faithful service, alongside an almost-as-old Compaq desktop from 2004. This was donated by my sister, who - like most 'non-techies' - took the tried & trusted route of a new machine with a new version of Windows pre-installed. By 2014, I'd been using Windows for nearly 30 years, through all its many & varied incarnations.....and quite frankly, I'd had enough. I was fed-up to the back teeth with it.
Come EOL for XP, I Googled 'Free operating systems'.....and was gob-smacked at what came up. My first introduction to Linux, within 3 days I'd kicked XP into touch & dived head-first into the uncharted waters of the Linux ocean. Sink or swim, this would be my OS from then on..!
I started with Ubuntu 'Trusty Tahr' (14.04 LTS). That lasted around 6 months, until Canonical - in their 'wisdom', with their custom-built kernels - dropped support for the Compaq's graphics chip. Freeze-ups became a way of life from that point on - the 'Unity' desktop's hardware acceleration requirements weren't helping much, either. An acquaintance on the Ubuntu forums suggested I take a look at Puppy; PhilB had just released Tahrpup in November of that year. I tried it; yippee, graphics behaved themselves again, and the machine was acting like it had turned into a racing car! It was also the first distro that ran on the old Inspiron, OOTB, with absolutely everything working correctly......even the notoriously finicky 82845's 'Brookedale' 'Extreme' graphics core. (There was nowt normal about the 'Extreme' graphics at all, 'cos Intel chucked the VESA standards manual out of the window when they built THAT thing. Naturally, it worked OOTB under XP... 
)
That was it. I'd 'found the one' for me. Within 48 hours, Tahrpup had taken up permanent residence on the HDD of both machines....
I haven't looked back since.
Mike. 
- i make enough daily mistakes on the linux platform so I'm just focusing on learning.</digression>
Anyone can go out and buy an up to date computer. For many of us here the "fun" is in the challenge of making something useful that woud otherwise be discarded. Just finished converting an Acer CB3-532, cpu=n3060, ram=2gb, eMMC=16gb to a dual boot ChromeOS + Puppy BW64. It has a broken screen so now has to wait for me to find an affordable donor screen.
-even if i didn't fully understand it....)