[Ma13tt0]

My parents have a really old laptop from probably around 2000 or so. Is a extremely small (10.5 inch screen) IBM Thinkpad that runs Windows NT 4.0. It only has about 6Gb of memory, total. Also, the only form of input is a floppy disk drive, that connects through USB. Is it possible to upgrade the memory and ram on this old fella? Right now im using it to takes notes in Notepad, since my actual laptop is a 17 inch beast. Great computer but a little big to carry around discretely. Also if upgrading is possible, does anybody know if you'd be able to actually put in either a CD drive or DVD drive? Anyways, i'd appreciate any opinions.

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If it's running NT 4, this came out in July 1996 so I suspect the laptop is older than your guesstimate of 2000, but as it has USB on it, it could be anywhere between 1996 and 1998.

According to Microsoft, NT 4 doesn't support USB devices of any kind whatsoever. Therefore adding a new CD unit (which would have to be an external drive in a caddy) is a fruitless exercise as NT can't talk to it. There are third party addons to enable NT4 to talk to USB though.

[Neil Jones]

If it's running NT 4, this came out in July 1996 so I suspect the laptop is older than your guesstimate of 2000, but as it has USB on it, it could be anywhere between 1996 and 1998.

According to Microsoft, NT 4 doesn't support USB devices of any kind whatsoever. Therefore adding a new CD unit (which would have to be an external drive in a caddy) is a fruitless exercise as NT can't talk to it. There are third party addons to enable NT4 to talk to USB though.

[Ma13tt0]

Yeah, my flash drive doesnt work. So I guess im kinda screwed. It has a floppy disk add on. Are there any OP systems like Windows 98 or 95, that are in floppy disk format.

[SRX660]

Ma13tt0, please look on the laptop for a model number so we can look for a cdrom drive for it. Unless you want to do a direct connection parallel ( or serial) networking on the laptop to install a different OS on your system, the easist method is to buy a cdrom drive that will work on it.

http://www.laptopuni...om_drives.shtml

http://www.windowsne...s/wxpdcc9i.html

SRX660

[Ma13tt0]

It's an IBM Think Pad 240, and im not sure but i think the model number is 2609-21U.

[SRX660]

Heres some things i have found for this laptop.

IBM recovery diskette
http://www-3.ibm.com...cid=MIGR-4Q2KLY

You will notice where it says something about cdrom drives.

* IBM portable CD-ROM drive CD-20X
* CNF portable CD-ROM XA drive 2X
* Panasonic 783 portable CD-ROM drive

And problems with the portable cdrom drive.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/305911

The conclusion here is you will be spending way too much money trying to get this laptop up and running. The correct laptop cdrom drives are scarse and old enough i would not trust them to run for very long. The alternative here is to run linux on the laptop. There are dozens of sites on this subject.

http://www.stanford....nan//tp240.html

http://www.cis.ksu.e...inkpad-240.html

http://www.thpoon.co...ode/comp/tp240/

SRX660

[Ma13tt0]

I was looking at some of he sites that you listed and honestly they dont make a whole lot of sense to me. I really dont know a whole lot about Linux and installing it. Could you guys know of any really dumbed down versions of how to install it.