HP Omnibook 500

[houseisland]

I have been given an HP Omnibook 500 (F2974KT) -- PIII 700, 128 Mb PC133 RAM, (dying/dead 20 Gb hard drive), no docking station.

OK, it is small and cute, and it's built like a tank, and weighs about as much (in size/weight ratio).

I had to wipe it -- took forever -- appropriate tank-track like noises coming from the dying drive all the while.

Now the question is what do I do with it.

Hard drive - no problem - spare laptop drives a plenty.

Docking station - big problem -- no docking station means no optical drive and no floppy drive.

Floppy drive -- it will recognize an HP-branded USB floppy drive that I have and will boot to it but XP and 2K setup floppies don't like the USB drive and fail (never mind that we didn't get far enough here to see if the set up process would find the USB optical drive).

Optical drive -- it will recognize a USB optical drive but won't boot to it. This is not uncommon. Betcha if it were an HP-branded drive, it would be OK. The optical drive I am using works fine in other USB bootable systems.

RAM -- 128 Mb is wimpy for 2K and is way to wimpy for XP -- I have two 256 Mb strips (Samsung M64S3254CT2-L7A) but there must be some sort of single-sided double-sided issue here -- if one of these is installed (alone), the system sees only 128 Mb -- if two of these are installed, the system sees only 128 Mb -- if one of these is installed with the orignal 128 Mb strip, the systems sees only 256 Mb.

The NIC is PXE capable, so I suppose I could try setting up a RIS server but this seems like way too much work for an old PIII 700 laptop.



Any ideas/suggestions?

And yes it does make a handsome door stop.



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