320CT Trials and Tribulations
I’ve been looking for a small form factor laptop for awhile so I got a surplus laptop from work. Its a Toshiba Portege 320CT. Exactly what I was looking for. Its smaller than a sheet of letter size paper, about 1″ thick. 96mb ram, 266mhz, 4gb hard drive. Perfectly portable, something to throw in the car when going on vacation so I can check e-mail, etc.
The only problem is that it doesn’t have network or a CD-Rom. Trying to get an OS installed without either of those is a pain. Of course I remember loading slackware from 30 floppes but hey, that was 1994, I was happy to be running something unix-like on my PC instead of DOS or Win 3.11.
I found a docking station for it with a CD-Rom and an Ethernet port but the 2 I located are in Europe right now. Shipping would kill me.
Problem #1: It had Win2k installed and I didn’t have an admin password.
Miracle #1: I found a DOS boot floppy in my stack of disks.
Problem #2: No Cd-Rom, no network, i don’t have any easy way to move 400mb worth of install media to the hard drive.
Miracle #2: I was able to find an USPASPI.SYS driver online that actually lets me read a USB flash drive. Fortunately this little thing has 1 usb port. So in 128mb chunks I’m copying the Win2k install disk to the hard drive. Once its on the HD I should be able to fire up setup.exe and get this sucker installed.
So by this afternoon the copying should be done, we’ll see how the install goes. Wish me luck!
– Dave
Update 7/20/2006:
After I went through all the trouble of getting the Win2k install files on the blank hard drive I found a docking station with CD-Rom on ebay for $0.01 + shipping. It was sold as-is because had some issues with power. Turns out the power jack was bad. I bypassed it with some creative rigging and now I’ve got a docking station with a CD-Rom and extra USB port.
I also found a 3Com 10/100 ethernet card with x-jack (no dongles to break or lose) for $6 on ebay. Combine that with my old Orinoco Gold wireless card and I’m set for connectivity.
On the software front, I found another hard drive and installed Ubuntu on it. I had some issues with the weird screen size on this laptop (1024×600) and hacked the XF86Config a bit but still no luck. The deal breaker really was the speed, Ubuntu was dog slow on the Pentium 266 processor. So back to Win2k for now.
– Dave
January 8th, 2007 at 11:10 am
I can help you with the X server config for the screen should you ever want to go back to a *nix OS. E-mail me for details if you’re interested. BTW, DSL (Damn Small Linux) works really well on this machine with 96MB RAM.
January 8th, 2007 at 11:57 am
DSL is a great idea, I was so hooked on grabbing the latest/greatest Ubuntu I didn’t even consider researching to find a smaller/lighter Linux distribution. Next time I swap hard drives around I’ll give it a shot.
– Dave