Here you can post about what you did to get MX to work right with your computer or if hardware worked right out of the box for you. This is for the computers and/or hardware that is normally hard to get working right in Linux or MX.
I just resurrected my wife's 10-year-old cheap netbook with a first-gen Atom CPU and 1GB of RAM by swapping out its dead hard drive for the one from the other dead laptop (with a broken fan and big dead spot on the screen) and installing the 32-bit version of MX-18.2. It's kind of on the slow side but it runs and it's fun to play with. I plan to use it for a spare computer in case anything happens with my desktop. It was just a fun little project to see how a stock MX installation would run on this little old gutless wonder, and it does surprisingly well considering the hardware. I'm going by ancient memory here but I think it's no slower than it was with the Windows XP it originally came with. It never has been exactly a speed demon.
The battery won't take a charge, the shift keys on its keyboard don't work, neither does its touchpad, and the Korean company that made it went bankrupt in 2012 so there are no more parts, drivers or BIOS updates available, but it's better than no computer at all, even if I do have to set the date and time in BIOS every time I turn it on.
Nope. There's only one removable panel on the bottom and all that's exposed are the hard drive, RAM and wifi card. This is a really cheap piece of junk so it may not even have a CMOS battery, instead just using the system batteries for all I know. I'd have to take the entire case apart to confirm though.
@KBD: I'm not sure if it's really worth spending money on that netbook but I have, or used to have if the Mrs. didn't throw them away, a couple of 2GB DDR2 DODIMMs around here someplace but I haven't been able to unearth them. If I ever come across those guys I may try one in the netbook and see if I get a beep code or not, but otherwise I'll just leave it as-is as I don't want to invest money in it.
@Bluesguy: I had the hard drive in and out several times while I was trying different hard drives from my junk stash to see if any of them were any good, then again when I decided to use the 500GB drive from the HP Pavilion dv6 that needs repair, and you know, I never noticed if there was a CMOS battery under it so I couldn't tell you if it's there or not. I'll add looking under the HDD for it to my to-do list. The hard part would be finding a replacement if it's a non-standard battery, like a watch or hearing aid battery. Meanwhile I've just been leaving its AC adapter plugged in all the time.
-Bah! I finally found my 2GB SODIIMs and they're DDR3, not DDR2 like I thought. I have to go to a mall tomorrow that has a few computer stores in it so I'll see what I can find there, but DDR2 memory is getting harder and harder to find locally: everything's DDR3 or DDR4.
I bought my DDR2 ram sticks second hand online, at the time people were either throwing them, or nearly giving them away, probably be a bit harder to find now, but worth a look, I'd think. :)
Very odd. Thursday when I tried one of the 2GB SODIMMs in the netbook the BIOS splash screen didn't even display, and the stickers on the modules say they're PC3 which I thought meant DDR3. But I just went to repackage the two modules in their original packages with the intent to sell them when I noticed that the packages say 2GB DDR2 800 in large letters, so I tried installing one again and this time it worked! This is a very odd little computer. It's much happier with 2GB of RAM though, much less laggy.
Having a USB pendrive set aside, with a snapshot of my installed MX-18.2 burned to it, I decided to test several 32-bit distros: Peppermint 10, Sparky Linux 4.10-i686, Zorin OS 12.4 Lite and Linux Lite 3.8 (which is the last version they offered in 32-bit.) Sparky wouldn't even boot: kernel panic, couldn't uncompress or access (or something) the file system. The rest seemed slower than MX, just running them in demo mode from a USB: slower than MX on a live USB anyway.
Then I went ahead and tried antiX 17.4.1 Helen Keller in live USB mode with persistence. It's so speedy on this netbook that I decided to go ahead and install it. It will give me a system on which to learn my way around antiX and see how a pure antiX installation does things, which I reckon will help me learn even more about MX, just like running Debian in a virtual machine did on my desktop PC. Plus, I think this low-end machine may be more antiX material than MX material as antiX seems to run as fast, installed, on the netbook with an Inter Atom 1.6GHz processor and 2GB of RAM as MX on the Athlon dual-core 2.6GHz with 8GB of RAM, both systems having 120GB SSDs and DDR2-800 DIMMs. More (antiX) fun to come!
