Tuesday, May 15 2007 @ 11:49 AM EDT Contributed by: sde
Liam Proven writes "I'VE BEEN TRYING to reinstall my old laptop recently. It's a battered old Thinkpad i1200 series from about 2001. It was a basic, economy-model machine: no Ethernet, no floppy, no serial, no infra-red, single Type 3 Cardbus slot; don't even ask about wireless or Bluetooth."
One screen hinge is broken and I've fitted more than the official maximum amount of RAM (there's a 256MB SO-DIMM in its single slot, which only officially takes a 128, for a total of 320M), which works fine but /really/ confuses the BIOS. The hard disk whines nastily, too. Despite this, though, it's a real workhorse: it's very reliable and has never let me down. In the past it's run Windows ME (which it came with), Windows 2000 and XP - the latter sluggishly but solidly.
Since it was pensioned off a couple of years back, it's been running Ubuntu 6.06. This didn't install without a bit of a struggle, though - the kernel hangs on boot unless I pass the "irqpoll" switch. I don't know exactly what that does, but searching for info suggests that it saps performance somewhat.
