Old Notebook WLANing

[simon389]

I just got a Toshiba Satillite notebook that is really old but has the card slots on the left side. It has windows 98SE but only 120Mhz and 40mb RAM. Is there any chance I can get wireless working with such low system specs?

Simon

 

[folken]

I don't think so. Frankly, I'm surprised you got 98SE running on it.
It wouldn't necissarily be that the cards are incompatible. It would be that 98se wouldn't have the drivers built in so you would have to install the software that comes with the wireless card. I don't think the software would install much less run on that old of a machine

<A HREF="http://www.folken.net/myrig.htm" target="_new">My precious...</A>

 

[kwebb]

Of course you can. Just make sure any card you have has drivers for 98se and many if not most will. Won't be the fastest machine but your only talking about 20 or 30 Mb transfer rate anyway. Something that even a slow 2.5" older laptop drive will easily sustain. It's been awhile since I've installed wireless cards on something that old but I've installed hundreds on systems with similar specs and 95. The ONLY concern you have is getting drivers. other than that your fine.


What you might consider though if you want a bit better overall performance is running linux on that machine. You can download and run Knoppix right off the CD so you don't have to install the OS on the drive and you can play around with it and see how you like it. You will still need enough ram to run smoothly and with a laptop that old it might be hard, or not worth the money, to upgrade the memory if it has say, less than 128 MB.

Oops, just saw it had only 40 MB. You'd have to price it to see if it is worth it. Will still run the OS you have on it though, with wireless connectivity, again as long as the card has drivers.
<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by kwebb on 01/31/05 08:31 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[folken]

I don't think 98se has any wireless connection software built in. The drivers shouldn't be a problem but only having drivers won't let you connect to a wireless ap I don't think the connection software that comes w/ the cards will run on that old of a computer.

<A HREF="http://www.folken.net/myrig.htm" target="_new">My precious...</A>

 

[kwebb]

Valid point about the software utility but if the card has drivers for 98se then it will have the utility to hook up to the AP. The comment about it not running on that old of a computer is just nonsense.