Raspberry Pi
It originally came with Windows XP installed, but XP claimed there was no sound hardware installed, and also XP would not see any wifi networks
The wifi was easy to fix, the laptop has a 3rd party wifi card installed, so the official driver from the Dell site doesn't work, so I had to get the model number from the wifi card and search for the driver, once installed it connects fine, and it even has 5G capability.
The sound issue was a little more tricky to solve, XP claimed there was no sound hardware present, which seemed a bit strange. I went through several install/remove/reboot cycles with various sound drivers with increasing frustration. I eventually tracked down the problem to a faulty dial-up modem, once removed from the user port XP notified me that the sound hardware has appeared, and installed the drivers. Problems solved.
Moving on to the specifications, this laptop has a 32bit 1.7GHz Celeron single core and single thread processor, 1GB of RAM, 40GB hard disk, CDRW optical drive, S-Video out, a 1024x768 screen resolution, and all the ports you would expect of the era
The laptop is typical for the era, there's nothing special about it, except it has an S-Video port
There are two ports at the front, when it was donated to me it never had an optical drive, but I picked a CDRW drive up for a few quid on Ebay, with all the issues I had installing Linux, maybe I should have held out for a DVD drive?
The battery can fit in either port, or you can have two, the optical drive only fits in the right port
This is the battery and optical drive
On the right side there is an infra-red port, audio connections, dial-up modem socket (however, I had to remove the module to get the audio working), Ethernet, and S-Video output
On the left you have two 32 bit card bus slots, and the hard disk access cover
On the back there are legacy serial and parallel ports, a dock connector, a PS/2 keyboard/mouse port, USB 1.1, VGA output, and the power connector
Under the bottom cover, you have access to the RAM, these are 512MB modules to give 1GB of RAM, the Intel card is for the wifi, the bottom middle is where the dial-up card was
This laptop has had several operating systems installed, starting with XP, then XP Pro, Ubuntu and several variations of it, finally it has the X86 version of Raspbian installed, which runs wellHowever it can't boot from USB, so whatever you install must fit on a CD ROM, which most operating systems don't. You can use Plop boot manager to boot from USB, however Plop doesn't recognize my USB2 PCMCIA card, so you have to use the USB 1.1 port, which is painfully slow, but does work
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