[Lancaster] Laptop Power Managment

[Ken Hough]

Richard,

I'll send the laptop RAM chip by post as per address in your last 
message to me.

A nice idea to recycle old laptops to Africa, etc, but maybe not so good 
in practice if my old Toshiba is anything to go by and also a more 
modern AJP machine which my sister had. If anything goes wrong, you 
would be stuck in Africa, etc. I've worked in several African countries. 
Getting spares for anything is a real pain -- and then getting things 
fixed????? Also, RAM is usually limited on old laptops. To realistically 
run a desktop manager and office apps a minimum of 64MB of RAM is 
needed, and then only if the manager is something like 'icewm'. 128MB is 
a more practical minimum for the likes of KDE or GNOME. KDE will run on 
64MB RAM, but you may as well go and have a coffee while it's loading.

Much more practical to recycle old desktop PCs (>= Pentium CPUs, plus 
128MB RAM). They are more robust, use standard parts, are easily 
fixed/upgraded and more likely to survive high humidity and ambient 
temperatures of 40 degC or so.

On my limited experience with Debian, I certainly wouldn't recommend it 
for remote places where expertise is limited. Debian is not friendly and 
you have to know it (and Linux generally) to manage it. I've recently 
installed/set up both 'woody' and 'sarge' and have to say that I'm not 
impressed with either. They may be good in expert hands for 'serious' 
server work, but in both cases, installation programmes are (IMHO) 
primitive and software is dated.

Fedora, Mandrake or SuSE would be more appropriate. I'm a SuSE user, but 
have played with the others. As you might expect, I reckon SuSE v9.1 is 
the best all round from a user point of view and boxed versions come 
with good manuals.

WRT replacing Lion cells with NiCd or NiMH, I doubt that this would be 
successful as the charging regimes/circuitry are very different. I 
enclose an attachment on the subject.

Regards

Ken Hough

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