Found a laptop

[baby_mike]

I was walking down the street to my house when I noticed a laptop laying on the ground. It was a Dell Inspiron 1100, I had to buy a charger. I finaly got it yesterday. There is no OS on it though, and when I try to put windows 2000 pro on it it says unable to format hard drive, so I was thinking of formating it with a windows xp or linux disk then putting win 2000 on it.

How ever I did do some research on the Inspiron 1100. It seems that there is a major problem with them over heating.

Dell Inspiron - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[NARU]

Lucky fu*k....

[Eddy]

I wish I could walk down my street and found a free laptop

[Kip]

That's the same modeel of my laptop. Mine came with XP. Oh, BTW, how much RAM does it have currently? Mine came with 128 MBs, and I had to buy a 512 MB upgrade chip from Dell to make it faster.

[UnMarth]

Sounds to me that either some one lost it, or more likely though the laptop was broken and got rid of it irresponsibility. I wonder what the condition the hard drive is in. Personally, I will try and see what is one there, see if you can track the owner down. But that may not be possible as I suspect the hard drive is dyeing/dead.

I am not too sure about the laws where you live, but if you hand it into the police as lost property and they cannot find the owner after so many days, you get it back and it is now your property.

[Mickal]

My colleges found a Apple Air on the train once.
Also found: iPhone, Blackberry, and some other laptops.

[DarkSunDS]

I found a DESKTOP computer with XP. It kinda sucked, my laptop is more powerful.

As for overheating, use a book to elevate the back.

[baby_mike]

Originally Posted by Kip

That's the same modeel of my laptop. Mine came with XP. Oh, BTW, how much RAM does it have currently? Mine came with 128 MBs, and I had to buy a 512 MB upgrade chip from Dell to make it faster.

Yea it only has 128 in it, nut it doesn't have a OS on it at the monment

[andysetra]

Nice find

Most P4 based laptops of any brand had overheating issues. It was more Intel's fault than the laptop manufacturer, because their chips were power consuming heat beasts. If you're going to use it, I would suggest getting one of those cooling pads to stick it on (the kind with fans on them). It's a cheap way to make the laptop run fine. If it continues to overheat and you're feeling brave, open it up to clean out the fins in the heatsink as they fill up with dust sometimes.

If you want to get it running again, just throw Ubuntu on it, and add a 256mb stick of ram (should cost maybe $20 at most if used...). My laptop is around that vintage (including the prone to overheating part) and it still works just great for me

[Kip]

Originally Posted by Baby_Mike

Yea it only has 128 in it, nut it doesn't have a OS on it at the monment

Yep. Like I said, if you go on Dell.com, you can buy an upgrade chip for $66(If I remember correctly) and the RAM will jump up to 640 MBs.