New to me new laptop!

[J-Roc]

Well guess what i got my hands on for free! I'll give you 3 guesses and the first 2 dont count.

My neighbors brother who is physicaly disabled droped his compaq presario 1500 notebook and broke the screen. Well i offered to help retrieve his files from it. Its got a VGA port on the back so i pluged it into my other monitor and all is well. Well it turns out he had like 15mb worth of personal stuff on it. A waste of a cd so im holding the files on my comp untill he gets a new notebook next month. He said "what am i going to do with it? You keep it." His loss is my gain

Its got:
Win XP Home with product key sticker (which brings my total up to 3 )
2Ghz Pentium 4 processor
256Mb DDR266
ATI gfx
cd-rw dvd drive
floppy drive
1 laptop card slot
30Gb HDD FAT32

For some reason it only shows 20Gb. Ovride sugjested that there is a hidden partition with a backup copy of the OS. I think im going to reinstall windows and clean out the junk files to see if i can get it working any faster. I hope the windows cd will let me add that extra 10Gb into the "free" pool.

I was unbelievably slow when i first got it but i've done some maintenance and its slowly improving. I deleted all the crap programs i dont need, updated, defraged (which improved performance the most), cleaned and compacted the registry. I still dont think its as fast as it would be with a fresh install so thats my next move once i find my service pack 2 disk.

Now i just need somthing to use it for

[xmastree]

Nice, but...

Well it turns out he had like 15mb worth of personal stuff on it. A waste of a cd

Blank CD's aren't exactly expensive. Burn him one then you can do what you like with the disk.

Edit: Better still, use a RW then demand it back when he's got his files. After all, he's only given you a laptop

[weazel6265]

In my experience windows probably doesn't want to yield its grip on your extra space. What you could do if you can't get to it through windows is load up your favorite flavor of linux live cd, and you could then resize the main partition, or even check what is on the unknown area. You can even do this without losing anything on your main partition.

[J-Roc]

Thanks weazel, i'll look into that if reinstalling doesnt work out. Its probly not such a big concern right now anyway. I'm only one man and i allready have 2 superior computers. It might just end up being a folding computer or a data link for my projector.

xmastree, a waste is a waste. He was going to just toss it out. I saved his 6 pictures and 2 word doc's for him. Besides, he visits his brother (my neighbor) all the time so its not really troublesome to bring his new laptop with him. Heck, i could put it all online and he can get it from home.

Oh, i also have a screen solution i might be able to use. I have a heads up projector tablet that'll work. Only thing is that i need to light it from behind with a fair amount of lumens.

[xmastree]

[size=2]Nude-calendar 1177,

reported

[TheGreatSatan]

The memory is Upgradeable to 1GB. That will make a BIG difference