What should I use my laptop for?

[squ!ff]

I have a P233 laptop sat in my flat doing nothing. It has Win98 on it at the moment and the CD Drive is bust. It has no floppy of network card so the only way to transfer data is via the parallel cable (or serial cable). It *does* have a USB port but I still need to check if that works.

Any ideas for this useless piece of junk? I am skint and so can't a PCMCIA network card.

I like playing with networking and still have a lot to learn so if you have any interesting ideas for it please let me know!

Thanks

[froggy3132000]

What does "skint" mean? You can buy a Xircom card which will fit in your PCMCIA slot for networking. If USB works, you can find a USB-Ethernet adapter. There are many different things you can do to get a network card going on the laptop.

[squ!ff]

skint means 'lacking in funds'. i'm british...

i meant what could i possibly use it for without spending any money

[viperlin]

paperweight?

install linux on it for knowlege purposes

quake1

really big pen drive

something to stand on to make u tall enough to kiss the 6 foot blonde

[2damncommon]

The floppy and CD both being out make it more of a problem to load on new software.
You can fool with making a serial connection to another linux box, even from Windows 98. Only thing needed is a crossover-serial cable.
Then you start a getty for a serial port in /etc/inittab, and fire up Hyperterminal to connect to your Linux box. You can then use any text application available on your main box. As a matter of fact you could plug into any Linux serial port that has a getty running.

[squ!ff]

Thanks, I'll give that a shot. I could run madplay from my laptop and have it play on my main system, save me getting out of bed to reach the keyboard. cheers.

i'll try to get a NIC when i have the money