Subj : Old Laptop Memory
To   : DIGITAL MAN
From : ROB MCCART
Date : Thu Jul 28 2005 06:46 pm

DM>I think it can be safely argued that Linux (in text mode) is definitely a
  >"whole lot better than ... DOS", but if you don't want to run Linux (or any
  >Unix-like OS), then that's understandably not a solution for you.

It can be definitely argued that it's more advanced than Dos.
Will it work miracles on a 486 that Dos can't ?  I don't know
since I don't know Linux that well outside of a major GUI.
(And not that well inside one..)     B)

There are also hundreds of games and utilities available
for Dos and Win 3.1 but I have no idea how much small stuff
is out there for Linux for systems that are possibly older
than Linux itself..

I'm not saying I'm against it or that Dos is better.
It's just that I'd have to research the advantages for
a system that old to see if it's worthwhile learning
command line Linux to use it.

DM> > Will Linux have the special laptop video,
  > > sound and font drivers for a 14 year old machine ?

DM>Video and sound, most likely. Font drivers?!? :-)

I wasn't sure if TFT video was standard or different
for different makes. I did notice some utility that
loads a "Toshiba easy-read font" at Dos level which
prompted that inclusion. It might not make enough
difference to matter.  I'll have to disable it one
of these days and see if it looks much different..

And I just went through a fun couple of days getting rid
of a virus that was included with it at no additional cost...

Rather nasty one that puts itself in the MBR section of
the hard drive and encodes and moves the MBR elsewhere
so it's impossible to start the system without the virus
in place to 'assist' loading the MBR. Boot from a floppy
and you have no hard drive.

I tried the newest F-Prot version for Dos, which claims
it can remove the virus, and it said it did.. and a second
run through said it was clean.. but it was still there
and active. A little Googling found a program called
Integrity Master which was able to pull the MBR info out
of the virus, save it to a floppy, and then you boot from
a floppy and tell it to find a 'lost' drive and it rebuilds
the MBR from the saved info... All fixed..

This brought to mind a question though. They suggested
that just rebuilding the MBR using something like
FDISK /MBR  (I think it is..) is no better than formatting
the drive, that you still lose all files on the drive.
I've never had to do this but I didn't think that was right,
at least not on a single partition drive..  Any idea ?

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 þ SLMR Rob  þ I know everything. I just can't remember it all at once þ
 þ PDQWK 2.52 #17
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