Many years ago I lent an old slightly damaged laptop to a friend (the laptop locking mechanism was broken and the screen slightly damaged). Last year he bought a cheap but highly functional laptop after my loaner, now nearly ten years old, stopped working and eventually returned it to me for possible repair and use.It is a Compaq E500 which has a rather stylish black and grey layout, good quality keyboard and a clear colour screen (in 1999 it was retailing for $1,970 and in 2008 they sell on eBay for under $100). The hard disk had fatally crashed and windows now failed to boot up only ever giving a blue screen of death. I'm unsure if the hard disk has a physical problem but after it laying around on my study floor for six months I thought it might be possible to replace Windows with a suitable free small version of Linux so the machine could become a handy wireless web laptop and guest machine. [E500 Spec: 14.1 in 1024x786 TFT display (1600x1200 external), 12GB hard disk, CDROM 24x, Video Out, Pentium III 650MHz, 192MB SDRAM.]
After failing to get the standard Ubuntu to install from a CD I had to hand (I gave up after letting the disk whizz around for over a half hour) I did a little research and opted for Xubuntu which is a cut down version for machines with more limited resources. I downloaded and created a CD from the ISO file on my trusty MacMini. The E500 install took over an hour but the main screen gave a countdown bar so you can see something is happening. I re-booted when it told me and it worked first time. It boots up more quickly than it used to under Windows and had even recognized my 2GB USB flash drive!
After a little play to ensure that it seemed responsive enough I dug out an old Belkin wireless card (802.11b) and was quite astonished when I plugged it in and the OS used it to find wireless connections without any further configuration. I had to tweak the wifi settings to connect to my secure network but had it working as a wireless laptop fairly painlessly.1
It's now a smart "netbook" (with a much better screen than the Acer Aspire One) for checking email while watching TV. The remaining issues are hardware specific2 and I'm not sure I'll get around to fixing them, e.g. recognizing the function key buttons for changing brightness and volume & the second touch pad key doesn't do anything. All in all I'm pretty delighted to turn a useless brick into a nicely functional spare laptop.
Footnotes
[1] The old Belkin wireless card is so out of date that it can't support an encrypted connection so security on this laptop is reliant on screening by MAC address. In the process of testing it out I found wicd is a neat free Linux graphical tool for sniffing out and managing your wireless connection. I have just bought a cheap 802.11g card off eBay to solve the security problem.
[2] The hardware side remains a puzzle. The E500's BIOS is dated 1999 and there's a new BIOS that helps to solve the problem of buttons being available to non-Windows OS's (see discussion). Having reformatted the disk I can't install the new BIOS to flash (using a .exe file that HP have available) or (for some reason I can't fathom) run DOS from a floppy even with it set as the first boot device.
Postscript
I have tried booting from CD using the latest Puppy Linux (Dingo). It runs well, possibly faster than Xubuntu but I haven't managed to map the keyboard touchpad correctly yet. If I get this working I'll give it good trial as Xubuntu tends to take a couple of seconds to change screen tabs when running Opera, while I haven't noticed any real performance problems with Puppy Linux so far. When you think about it, it's pretty impressive to be able to run the latest version of the Opera browser on such an old machine.
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