A wee mess around with an old C400

the_syco

So, have an old Dell Latitude C400 that I haven't used in ages, as it's slow. So, for the craic, I decided to throw a small solid state hard-drive into it.

Are you mad, I hear you ponder? A SSD into that piece of poop? Well, yes, and no.

Ordered this a while back; http://dx.com/p/cf-to-ide-adapter-dma-support-9304

The awesome thing about it is that it's actually the perfect shape for a 2.5 HDD laptop enclosure (I had also gotten another one, of a different smaller shape in case it was a bad fit), so I put a 8GB Kingston CompactFlash Memory Card. Slotted it in, and the BIOS saw it, so threw in a XP Pro disk into the (external) DVD drive, and installed it. I think it took the guts of 4 or 5 hours, but it was a slipstreamed CD, with a few things that need unpacking/installing, so that may have slowed it down a tad.

There is only 256MB's of RAM in it at the moment, so it's a bit slow, but happy that it worked, as it's a cheap "fix" for those with old laptops whose harddrive failed, if they only need it for basic web browsing.

So, it's solid state, but just not of the usual sort

Agent Smith

How long to boot?

the_syco

Agent Smith wrote: »

How long to boot?

Three minutes 33 seconds, to fully load (as in, the Start button is clickable). Going to check if the RAM I tried last time works with the "upgrade" later on.