Netbooks!

So at a tag sale on Saturday I bought an old Asus EeePC 1005HA for 20 bucks. The only problem was a cracked screen. (Up the middle. Most of it still visible.) The HDD still had the original install of XP, full of crap and the guy's stuff. (Even a folder of his wedding pictures. I barely looked at any of it before I formatted the drive.) I installed XP Pro from my disk and got it all set up. The issue is that I've apparently installed this copy onto about a dozen computers and I'm not allowed to activate it anymore. Now, I got around this with a registry edit (Don't yell at me. No one really cares about XP anymore, right?) but I was still able to update to SP3 but I can't install any other updates because I used my old disk since I forgot where I put the install disk I modified by adding all the updates and SP3 after support for XP ended. I guess I can either ignore this or go through reinstalling everything.

I've already ordered a screen for it yesterday (About twice as much as I paid for the netbook itself.) and it should arrive by Thursday. I've already done a heatsink mod and because the CPU uses such a low amount of watts it doesn't need an actual heatsink. It's cooled by the metal plate behind the keyboard. The other components (Intel chip and the other thingy) are cooled by an actual heatsink and fan. Even with the crappy cooling the CPU runs very cool after replacing the thermal pad with paste and a copper shim. Now, why would I do this? Well, because I like doing it and I do it to all the laptops I use.

Now, last year I bought another netbook at a different tag sale. A Toshiba NB255-N250. This person is someone who I've bought laptops and stuff from before and I got it for a whopping 5 bucks. He told me the HDD was broken and that was all. Actually, the screen had inverted colors and everything was blurry. (Weird, right?) I installed Windows onto it and after awhile it got corrupted which led me to believe the HDD was broken, right? Well, I've had the HDD in my main (good) laptop as a second drive for about 2 months and nothing has happened. (I used it as an external drive before that.) I put an old 160GB HDD into the netbook and ordered a screen and it was all good. I used it with Windows 7 64 bit just fine for awhile. Then one day I got extremely mad at something and that poor netbook was the only thing within reach. Absolutely smashed the screen and ruined the HDD. (The rest was fine.) So it went into my shelf along with all the other old and broken laptops. I want to fix it up but it's not really top-priority. (About $35-40 for a screen and $15 for a 60GB HDD.) The only reason I didn't have XP on it is because there was very little driver support.

The EeePC is older but it has some good advantages: Bigger battery, lower voltage CPU that is overclockable, GMA 945 compatible with GMABooster, etc. Because of that it should have longer battery and be more modifiable. I've already gotten the CPU to 2.1GHz with Throttlestop keeping the speed and voltages pushed all the way up. It should make for a nice light gaming or video watching thing. Mostly because my main laptop is a lot bigger and heavier and the battery only lasts like 2-3 hours tops. One thing is that I do like the design of the Toshiba quite a bit better.

Just wanted to share and see if anyone had ideas for what I could do with this thing.

EDIT: Also, I've been wanting to do something with the Toshiba for awhile now. Only issue is that it won't let me install XP onto an SD card or a flash drive or anything without an HDD to write boot data to. I could just buy another HDD, but does anyone think it would make a decent small Minecraft server with just 1GB of RAM?

 

This is cool! I wish I had the time to spend with outdated technology. You know, if you kept doing that as a hobby, it wouldn't be long until you had a formidable collection of laptops. I dunno why, but that would be cool as heck... cloud computing maybe? XD

EDIT: I dunno if it'd make a good minecraft server. Minecraft servers often run harder than the end user, so I dunno. I guess if you keep it relatively small (in-game).

 

I use a pretty cheap but sturdy gateway laptop circa 2008 or 2009. It's got a AMD turion x2 or some shit in it. It runs at 80+c sometimes because I'm too lazy to replace the paste and take it apart. The keyboard is missing 3 keys. I could replace it for about 25 bucks but poor.

 

Nope. You need at least 4gb of ram and more than two cores. Even a modern laptop just does ok.

 

Really? Even for a server that usually never has more than 4 or 5 people online at once? I do have a p4 3.6ghz HT PC with 3 or 3.5gb ram but its kinda loud and uses power..

 

It is more of a java memory issue. I assigned 512mb to my server and the JVM gobbled 4GB. :/ It might be broken java arguments though.

 

Java defaults to 1024 (I provided links to evidence in another thread, I am not going back to find them, someone else can), won't go beyond that unless you manually specify more and minecraft will indeed throw an Out Of Memory error when it tries to exceed it.

You want "-Xmx512M -Xms512M" for 512mb.

The minecraft server is dual threaded and 1 of those threads is rather low priority. 2 cores should be fine.
lightweight linux distro + minecraft should be doable. Can easily run a few players on a vanilla non bukkit server from 512mb. General rule used to be 75-100mb per player.

 

So, screen came today. It looks really nice because it has no glossy or anti-glare crap over it. It is now nice and fully functioning.

I wonder how well it would play Drive.. My other netbook got like 2 FPS with a stripped D15 and Grid map. I think it got like 7 (or 17, I forget) on RoR.

 

I know, that's my exact argument I had set. I'm still leaking to 4096MB. That's why I'm thinking memory leak. I am on j7u51 though.

 

Have it running as a file server. Then feed it some links in the evening and retrieve the files in the morning.

All of above is dead simple with a bit of Linux and SSH/SFTP, I've been doing it for years and downloading huge files (the SteamOS installer image being the latest example) feels so much less stressful nowadays. At times I do forget I'm on a really unstable ADSL connection.