Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Where does one get the free laptop from?
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Well, I got my very first book reading device - a "bombarded out laptop" - by salvaging it from trash.
It was a lowly 386, 640x480 grey scale display, whooping 2MB of RAM, dead battery and no hard disk. It was quite unusable for anything else but reading ebooks from a [DOS boot] floppy disk with a lean reader software and a [part of the] book.
Later on I was even able to graft a harddisk onto it and even install Linux. I have learned quite a bit about Linux internals when I was trying to create an absolutely minimalistic Linux environment. An impulse to install Linux came when I wanted to have longer file names than 8.3 characters supported by DOS and my brief friendship with Minix turned sour.
I think that there are quite a few such notebooks available for [almost] free today. You can comfortably read book on a machine with 386 processor and 2MB of RAM with Windows 3.11 installed. And it might even boot faster than a modern machine with Vista installed ;-)