I remember buying this laptop back in 2001, I had just started a contract position were I was doing project management and required my own computer. I was in Dixons in MeadowHall and they had this laptop on offer at a much reduced price (cannot remember the price I paid back then). My thought was it was made by Toshiba and would do the job specified. I recently grabbed this machine out of storage to see what I can do with it – I had an idea to use it for a Linux box of some sort.
The easiest step into mobile multimedia: The Satellite 1800-400
- Intel® Celeron™ processor, 800 MHz
- 14.1" TFT colour display
- Integrated 8-speed DVD-ROM drive and diskette drive
- Integrated international V.90 data/fax modem
- 128 MB SDRAM standard
- 15.0 GB hard disk
- Easy Keys for CD/DVD/MP3 player and Internet browser launch
- Windows® Millennium, Microsoft Works Suite® 2001 and Win DVD
- Trident Cyberblade ALi Graphics Card
Points to Note
The first thing we have to remember here is that it has no networking built in, back in them days it was not common to have RJ45 or wireless. The best we could hope for was a modem built in and a Jack to connect it to the wall. The USB Sockets were 1.1 (slow) and it had a PCMCIA slot for 2 cards. I had fitted a 40 GIG hard drive and the memory had been upgraded to 256MB – in 2001 this was major speed boost. The other thing is the Celeron 800Mhz is in fact a Pentium III – yes folks, this is slow as hell in today’s speeds and even a virtual machine blows this away in terms of performance.
On with the show
I first stuck in the Linux Mint 8 CD I had written and proceed to boot and was met with an odd error page. I managed to get past this odd error by removing the Netgear PCMCIA Wireless card and it proceeded to try and start Mint. The screen went black though and I had no idea what it was doing, so this was a fail straight away. I next pulled out my Ubuntu 9.10 32bit CD – much the same happened and I worked out that in fact it was the Trident Cyberblade ALi Graphics not able to display even a simple 2D display.
Ubuntu 9.10 Server
I turned my mind to maybe running a GUI-less Linux, so I downloaded the Ubuntu 9.10 Server 32Bit version and wrote to a CD. It got stuck at the network part as it did not recognise any PCMCIA Network cards or any USB wireless I had plugged in and a server without networking seemed rather pointless to me. I could have installed it anyway and worked out (via command line) how to get the wireless working but I am betting it would have involved lots of swapping stuff around by USB memory sticks and mega typing into the console. I stopped before the install got to the partitioning part.
Windows XP
I still had windows XP Pro installed and proceeded to install a USB wireless stick which worked straight away, picked up my wireless and let me enter the secret key. It took about 1.5 hours to install one update, Net Framework – this machine was truly the slowest thing on the planet. We have to remember though it is 9 years old and in technology that is amazing it still works. The screen runs at 1024×768 and it might have some use for something – just not sure what. Seems a shame just to put it for scrap as it does work, I am updating it now (might take all day) and see how it goes.
