Now We're Off and Stumbling Around

Well now, we're physically underway.
I picked up a working laptop off EBay and received it this morning. It's an IBM Thinkpad 600 and I got it for $130 with shipping. Yeah, I know, that really eats into my $200 limit.


It has a Pentium II - 266MHz processor and 96MB of RAM. The screen is bright and clean and should serve my purposes nicely. The Hard Drive is 4GB and that should be more than enough for this project. I'm a little concerned about the RAM as most of the Linux distributions that I've looked at want 256MB. I can pick up a couple of 128MB sticks for $20 and I may go ahead and do that and bump up a little closer to the $200 ceiling.

Oh yeah, and it has a 24x CD ROM -- which will be real handy for installing the Linux OS and the slide show application.

I really want to have wireless network capability for ease of adding slideshow photos ...etc and I can get a Linksys Wireless B PCMCIA adapter for $16....... hmmmmmm, let's see - $130 + $20 +16 is $166 so that would leave $34 for unknown emergencies -- that's not so bad, but the higher math to do the calculation was a bit taxing .

My approach from here is to get one of the Linux distributions successfully implemented with wireless networking(more on that in the next post) before I start tearing apart the hardware. Once I start the hardware distruction, I mean dismantling I'll provide more pictures - should be interesting.

Well, we're off and treading more or less carefully -- check back.