Asymmetrical Information

Do what I did...load it up with scanned pictures and set it on your mantle and have it display your pictures in a slideshow. I disguised mine with a wooden picture frame for the screen and a silk scarf to hide the bottom part (had to go to Mom's place for that.) When ever you look at your picture frame it's showing a new image.

Option #1: Donate to kids:
http://www.computersforchildren.com/

Options #2: Wait 15 more years and go here:
http://www.vintagecomputer.com/

Personally, I love computers, but the damn things have a life span of about 18 months.

Load linux on it and make it a firewall or router or web server or print server or honey pot or about a thousand other things.

Sixty to one hundred megabytes? That's pretty useless - even to charity. Load 80s arcade games onto it and set it up in your den as an entertainment station.

They can make conveniently small and portable keyboard interfaces for rack servers, routers, and that sort of thing. But I like the picture display idea.

Load an old copy of your favorite word processor on it, and take it to the beach, a park, or anyplace else you want to type, but wouldn't want to take an expensive computer. If it gets rained on, or crud gets in it, or it mysteriously catches on fire, or whatever, no big deal.

Word processing is about all those old puppy's are good for (unless you actually need one of those network tools Jack Funchion describes above).

That's too small a drive for a modern linux box, even for just firewalling (especially if you want it to do any logging). I've got a Debian firewall that barely gets by on a gigabyte drive.

The slideshow idea is a good one, but almost anything that I can think of to do with it (e.g., a controller for a smart house) would probably be done more cost effectively with newer hardware, and would require a high geek factor to implement.

Boat anchor? Door stop?

Get an IR port and an ethernet card for it and set it next to your AV equipment. Allows computers attached to your network to control your AV from anywhere in the house -- for that matter, put on X.11 software and have it control the lights in your house as well.

And for the most extreme and paranoid geek, an old laptop is a great Kerberos server. Simply padlock that sucker into a filing cabinent with holes drilled for power and network and let it run. Smart card enable your door locks and go keyless. :)

But the absolute best think you could do with it? Find a worthy 5-10 year old and let 'em rip.

that should be x.10 software, not x.11...BIG DIFFERENCE!

Rand Simberg: You can fit a networked Linux distro on two floppies, I think 100 MB is enough for a firewall. Not that you'd want to use Debian or Redhat for it, but it's possible. But yeah, you'd have to probably have the logs dump themselves elsewhere.

You could put it in your kitchen and use it to store recipes. (especially those recipes downloaded from the internet) A big display would be better than a PDA when cooking. You wouldn't have to cry if you spilled anything on it, either. It could also be a notepad/calendar/clock/spare address book in the kitchen.

"You can fit a networked Linux distro on two floppies, I think "

Coyote Linux will fit on a single floppy, and can be used as a router, simple firewall, etc. I was using an old K6-233 machine for just that, in fact, until space got more important than cheapness, and I replaced it with a dedicated home router. It worked like a champ.

That aside, it's unlikely that the Thinkpad has two Ethernet ports, which you'd need for that purpose.

I'm rather fond of the picture frame idea also. Neat idea!

Target practice.

Cpt. Mojo has a very good idea. Use it for word processing. That's what personal computers were originally for, anyway.

James

I like the target practice idea. I'm sure that most of you have seen this, but here's someone carrying out the same idea with the old "CueCats."

http://metathink.com/killcat/mgcat111_mpeg1_54kbps_320x240.mpg

But seriously, folks, you could do worse with giving it to a kid and letting them rip. I learned all my destructve computer habits with an Osborne II.

Probably has a passive display (read: poor viewing angle) and a 486 or Pentium processor in the 100MHz-or-less range?

It will run DOS6/Windows 3.1 rather well, however; thereafter find yourself an old copy of Word for Windows, and the Microsoft Arcade pack, and voila.

Or start a dedicated DOOM lan ;')

All I can think of is that we sure have become spoiled.

Put QNX or maybe linux on it and use it for portable web browsing and email.

Use it as a sort of a mini-iPod. Cram as many mp3s on the hard drive as you can, and put it in a backpack while you're walking, riding a bike, etc.

Oh, by the way, your counters seem to be working fine from where I sit. I clicked on them and saw 2000+ daily traffic.

They only pick up traffic to the main page, not the archive pages. Urrr.

A computer of that power can be used to control an amateur telescope.

I once had an old (mostly) useless laptop. I found a great use for it as a student. I cracked the screen and then used it as an excuse for late (procrastinated) papers that were due. You can drop in in the stairway on the way up to class, and get all weepy about how you can't get it to work. This buys an extra day or two.

I once had an old (mostly) useless laptop. I found a great use for it as a student. I cracked the screen and then used it as an excuse for late (procrastinated) papers that were due. You can drop in in the stairway on the way up to class, and get all weepy about how you can't get it to work. This buys an extra day or two.

put it on ebay. you'd be shocked at the prices people are willing to pay for old laptops ... i'm talking in the $100 range. seriously.

i only require 10 percent as a finder's fee. :)

I only see hit counters on your main page, not the archive pages. You need to put them on your archive template to get them to work. Alternatively, your web host may provide stats on each page accessed, but those would only be privately available to you.

If you're serious about Win 3.1, I can send you disks and a copy of Lotus SmartSuite 3.1 for Win31 (which has Ami Pro 3.0, IMNSHO the best word processor I have ever used, even if it did crash a lot. It has the best equation editor ever made in a word processor.) Oh, and pick up a 10baseT card, they're dirt cheap if you can find the old 16-bit PCMCIA's. Then I'll send you my Extra Special DOS/Windows Everything CD (I eventually built a boot disk with TCP/IP abilities from DOS, so I could boot from it and then ftp everything I needed over from another computer on the network).

If it has two serial ports, it's worth more on eBay (ie, put it in the description)... won't go into why if you don't already know, because you don't want to know.

Put a real operating system on your old laptop -- Linux. Just about any flavor will do, I recommend Red Hat. Real OS's don't take up hundreds of megabytes all on their own, that's what makes them infinitely more useful.

wow. i must be using magic to post this message, because i'm using a mac! that has an OS! that takes up almost a gigabyte!

amazing what they can do with dixie cups, string and spit ...

This is Jane. See Jane. See Jane blog. Jane likes to blog. Why does Jane blog? She blogs because she is conflicted. How can you tell Jane is conflicted? She is conflicted because she does not like people to know who she is. Is she Megan? No, she is Jane. Can we see her picture? No, she covers her eyes. But still Jane links to Glenn when Glenn says Jane is a babe. Does this settle why Jane blogs? No. Jane blogs because Jane likes the free and fast tech support. Ah, I see now.

Linux was my first thought. (What you're going to have Linux doing on it might be a problem, but Linux is fine with less hardware than that.) However, I recall hearing various stories about compatibility issues with Thinkpads, especially way back when 100MB was considered big enough. Who's tried putting Linux onto one?

I see that the "installing linux on your really old machine" ground has been pretty well covered, so I won't go into it anymore than to confirm that you have _plenty_ of space on that machine for a minimal Linux distro. But you're an NT geek, right?

As for your hit counters- why are you relying on hit counters? You have an admirable obsession with measurement, so why would you be interested in "some number" that you get from a hit counter, when it's impossible to know what it measures? If you want to know about your traffic, you analyze your logs. It's not that hard to write scripts to do so, and there are a lot of pre-written scripts available if you don't have time to roll your own.

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