13 year old Craptop

[WMD]

Sounds good but what programs can I run under these graphical desktops?
Could I run ABIWord?

AbiWord requires 16MB RAM anyway, so, no.

[Aloone_Jonez]

Thank you all for your suggestions, I think I'll try DR-DOS and one of those graphical desktops mobrien_12 is talking about.

Can anyone suggest of a decent Word processor that'll either run under plan DOS or one of these desktops?

[mobrien_12]

Can anyone suggest of a decent Word processor that'll either run under plan DOS or one of these desktops?

The GEM Word processor is available free of charge at FreeGEM and/or OpenGEM's site.  It is somewhat limited compared to todays word processors, but give it a try and see if you like it.

For serious document preparation, LaTeX is available for DOS and OS/2 and all sorts of other operating systems at

http://ftp://tug.ctan.org/pub/tex-archive/systems/

LaTeX will run decently on that machine.

[H_TeXMeX_H]

DSL should work fine on it ...

[Pathos]

...not with 4mb ram

[_kill__bill]

OpenBSD, assuming you have a FPU on it (if it is post-i386, you have it). It can be run on older, assuming you don't mind recompiling the kernel with GPL_MATH_EMULATE. X will run on it in under 500m of disk space.
 
Word processing might be tricky. I use OpenOffice, but that won't wotk. Neither will KOffice. Abiword might if you can nab more RAM or make a big swap drive.
 
Install can be a -----, though.

[H_TeXMeX_H]

4 MB RAM :eek: is that even possible ... what the fuck runs on 4MB RAM ? Upgrade it ... if possible. I suppose most laptops aren't upgradable though

[Aloone_Jonez]

It isn't upgradable and even if it was it wouldn't be worth it.

Lots of things can run on 4MB of RAM and it should be more than enough for simple wordprocessing and compiling small console programs.

How long have you been using computers for?

Most people nowadays don't use even half their computer's power and if they do it's wasted on running anit-virus software. Software is becomming more bloated, and I'm not just talking about Windows, OpenOffice and Linux are suffering from feature bloat too. Do you realise that  as long as you're not playing any games or ripping any DVDs the amount of memory in your PC that's actually being used to store you data is minimal?

You can do a lot without using much memory, 10,000 word essay only takes 64KB to store and even a 2560x2024 16M colour image only takes 15MB! So I hope you can imagine that my 4MB laptop is way oversized for word processing, and my old p200 with 32MB of RAM is more than big enough for saving images I've taken with my digital camera providing I install fairly light software on them. I rest my case, for most simple computing tasks like web surfing and word processing with moderate sized images 16MB of RAM is probably enough for most applications.

EDIT:
I've downloaded all the DR-DOS images, now I've just got to get hold of some floppies and install this thing.

[mobrien_12]

AJ is right.  I remember when that was a ridiculous amount of RAM and I used to get real work done.  You can run Linux and BSD, just no X... X takes RAM.  

DR-DOS will work nicely and run fast... just the 640k RAM Limit is there

[solemnwarning]

Most people nowadays don't use even half their computer's power and if they do it's wasted on running anit-virus software.

I think i use it all

int me_developer = 1;

The CPU is often at 99%

[Aloone_Jonez]

Of course the CPU will be at 100% when you're compiling a program.

DR-DOS will work nicely and run fast... just the 640k RAM Limit is there

A common myth, while this is the case for 16-bit DOS programs, most newer and resource demanding programs like games use a DOS extender wich means they can address up to 4GB of memory as one linear flat segment some even support virtual memory. DR-DOS is very good in this respect, it includes a multi-tasker which can perform mult-threading and a built-in DOS extenter.

[solemnwarning]

Of course the CPU will be at 100% when you're compiling a program.


A common myth, while this is the case for 16-bit DOS programs, most newer and resource demanding programs like games use a DOS extender wich means they can address up to 4GB of memory as one linear flat segment some even support virtual memory. DR-DOS is very good in this respect, it includes a multi-tasker which can perform mult-threading and a built-in DOS extenter.

Well i spend a lot of time recompiling my code and making sure changes work, also Folding@Home uses a lot of CPU even when running as a low priority, not to mention media players take some CPU time for decoding

[Aloone_Jonez]

If you mean ripping DVDs then yes, but just watching them doesn't use much power, even my old p200 could play most movie files on the Internet and that was only two years ago.

[piratePenguin]

I spend lots of time compiling things but, because I can still use the computer for browsing the web and everything else I normally do, I don't mind.

2600+ and 256mb RAM are more than enough for (even?) me.

Hell I can open all the hungry graphical apps on my system and switch to and from them doing work pretty damn fast.

[Aloone_Jonez]

The biggest bottleneck as far as noticeable speed is concerned is the hardisk and Internet connection speed, RAM and CPU don't make much difference most of the time.