7-8 year old Toshiba laptop... Convert to Android OS?

I am not sure where to post this… but hopefully someone here can help me out.

I have an old Toshiba Portege 7200CT laptop, in really good shape. From what I can tell it works fine. I installed a blank 60G formatted hard drive. When i boot it up It gets the initial Toshiba logo screen and then turns black.

Is there any way I can install an Android OS onto this drive?… and turn it into a tablet PC for basic www surfing and the likes. Its a smaller PC with no internal CD drive

Its a Pentium III i think, so I speculate running a PC OS is going to be slow and crash it a lot.

thanks!!

I use Linux Mint distro on an old desktop crt computer at the deer camp for trail cam pics.

There is such a thing like Android for the X86 architecture, but I think it's not the best solution for a machine like this. How much RAM does the machine have?...That's more important than the computing power of the CPU. A small footprint Linux might be better suited.... for example Puppy Linux or Damn Small Linux. Here a article about lightweight Linux Distributions and here another one with minimum requirements.

It shouldn’t be too slow. I believe my brothers galaxy 3 uses a 2.0 ghz. And his galaxy mesmerize had a 1 ghz processor. Only problem I might see is the control, it’s made for TOUCH smartphones. There is things like this . But It just isn’t the same. What you could do, is use the windows 8 developer preview(might be in beta right now). Or get linux.

Here’s the specs of your laptop

It has only 4 mb of gpu ram. Even my 3 year old 9500gt has 1 gig of ram. I think the minimum for even windows 8 is 256 mb and 1 ghz of cpu. It also has 64mb of ram, which is extremely low. Most computers bought at stores have around 4 gb.

You might be used to something like that, but I just couldn’t stand those very outdated specs. I found that *browsing became a breeze *once I updated from a 2.0 ghz processor with intergrated graphics and only 1.5 gigs of ram; to a dual core 2.6ghz(overclocked to 3.3), a 9500gt and 4 gigs of ram.

I know it’s several hundred dollars, but getting an Asus netbook would work nice. My brother got one for college notes and browsing on the couch. Works well for the money, think he got it for $300. He got the extended battery option though, for like $30 more, and 2 gigs instead of 1 gig of ram.

My brother also just bought a new gaming pc to run bf3 and GW2. Here’s just some rough specs: 9800gt, 320gb, 4gigs of ram, dual core 3.0ghz, with an acer 20 inch screen in a cool black case with some led’s and fans. It’s not worth anything to him for games nowadays, he sold it to his friend for $200.

Sorry if it seemed like it was knocking your laptop, and crushing your dreams. It’s just that it’s very low specs for todays graphic intense os’s.

Bottomline: I wouldn’t try android, I would just get a Netbook if I had the money. It’s just that your laptop specs are pretty slow.* But, if you had to, just get linux!*

With the right software, almost anything is possible. Damn Small Linux needs a 486 CPU and 16 MB ram... so your machine is clearly overpowered. ;-) Also a slimmed down Win98 + WinXP can be lightning fast... but like I said... the information about the RAM quantity is crucial to make a decision what would work well. BTW my routers/firewalls are even lower powered machines (Pentium 1) with IPCOP and Monowall on them.

Pentium III should be fine with XP, I had a couple that ran well with it, nice and stable. Just disable all the fancy graphical transitions.

Any of the major Linux distros should compile and run fine too, just check what version they recommend for your specs. Android is Linux anyway, but unless it has been compiled with your specific architecture in mind, even if it installs, chances are most of your hardware won’t work.

Yeah, those 2 distros are lightweight :slight_smile: I use Xubuntu on my “one of the first”, Acer netbooks. Had 512 of RAM. Got 1 GB module for only 6 bucks! (with shipping to Spain) Much better now.
If you already have 1 GB, don’t worry. If not, adding more RAM is the cheapest way and one of the easiest to make your PC/whatever faster.

According to the link to the specs, you have at least 64M of ram, and potentially 320M. This is not much for a modern OS.

Somebody has already suggested Puppy linux, and I’ll second it. If you have the maximum 320M, you might get away with one of the *buntu family - I’d suggest lubuntu, or Mint LXDE.

+1

I EDC (24-7) a bootable pendrive with both Puppy Linux (my own tweaked remasted version with a few extra programs) and a set of Windows Portable Apps on it. I also use Linux Mint on a spare desktop.

Great way to re-purpose old computer hardware.

Linux is a great idea. I would recommend Puppy Linux, small and fast.

You can try various Linux distributions by downloading a live/bootable CD version or better yet, install on a bootable USB Memory stick. Puppy has instructions for both methods or you can go to: PenDriveLinux for other distributions.

Yup, that’s what I like: you have “try it without install” on almost all distros. Do it from USB drive, much faster than CD.

"Booting from USB"-capability was pretty rare back then and the USB-port is probably 1.1. A Live-CD is slow but good to try out the functionality of each distro.... especially if all the hardware is supported.

Good point! Some machines early USB implementations were defaulted off in the BIOS, others struggle to boot from USB.

ok thanks… not having much luck though.

It just boots up a black screen asking me to insert system disk and press any key? like the motherboard is locking out the USB or hard drive…?

Any tips around this one?

thanks

D’oh! You’re right, Vectrex :bigsmile: My bad, absolutely forgot that USB booting is quite a “new” thing, so I’m almost sure that notebood doesn’t have that capability :shy:
Anyway, not a prob as far as I know - there are a program that simulates that :slight_smile: And if I remember well, it’s like GRUB. If not, just burn any distro you want to *re*writable CD/DVD. (DVD is faster)
BTW, kramer, set your CD/DVD drive as first booting device. And, in case you indeed have an USB booting, set it first and DVD-ROM second (HDD as third)
Good luck :smiley:

I was able to enter the BIOS and there’s no USB priority. I don’t have a CD ROM drive for this laptop, all i have is the HDD. But when I set BIOS to the HDD as first priority it asks to insert system disk.

Am I hosed?

thanks!!

If you can’t get it to boot from USB then your only option may be to remove the hard drive and install an image on it. Do you have and old USB laptop hard drive caddy, if not a cheap adaptor can mount on in a desktop machine.

Edit Swede74 beat me to it :wink:

How can you install linux on diff machine and then just connect back again the HDD? Unless those 2 PCs/notebooks/whatever have the same HW, it won’t work properly (or won’t work at all) unless at least mo-bo is the same :expressionless:
I have found this article about USB boot. Don’t know if this is that app I had in mind.

That old of a machine is frankly not worth using. If you want to try out alternative OSs or whatever, just install them on your current machine in a VM. The lost opportunity cost is more than the price of a budget refurb box and it sounds like it’s frustrating rather than fun anyway.

It’s tough for cheap bastards like us to throw away stuff, but sometimes you just have to rationalize it to yourself.

Install the boot image to the hard drive, not the OS. Then it will work