[cumbria_lug] Use for an old 486 laptop?

[Michael Saunders]

Lo all,

Need to pick your collective brains on this matter! Here I have a
bulky old 486 laptop (25 MHz, 8M RAM, 300M HD) doing nothing of
interest, but, being a geek and hateful of waste, I'm trying to find a
worthwhile use for it. Any ideas?

To put things in context, I have a proper laptop for day-to-day use,
and the 486's Ni-Cad battery pack is dead so it can't be used
portably. Also, I've got a dedicated router for my ADSL connection and
P75 laptop serving a few Internet goodies; it's no use there.

What do you reckon? The thing runs Debian 2.1 with reasonable speed
(even X) and Windows 3.1 doesn't struggle too much either. The only
idea I've come up with so far is stripping it to bits and trying to
cram the system into a NES case (or similar) -- fun, but useless.

So, is there anything cool this old laptop can do? However weird?

Cheers,
Mike



-- 
Michael Saunders
www.aster.fsnet.co.uk