A month or so ago, I bought a Gateway2000 Colorbook 486 at Goodwill for about 20 bucks. It came with 4MB of RAM and a 250MB hard drive. The processor speed is 25MHz. Expanding the RAM is near impossible, since its expansion slot is very proprietary. Though I did find a vendor online that sells 4MB expansion modules for Colorbooks for $33. I intend on purchasing that later.

First, Alynna and I upgraded the drive to 800MB, and tried installing a distribution of Linux on it. No go. Minix wouldn’t even work. So, we put FreeDOS on there instead, and it worked pretty well, though I couldn’t get networking working right on it. After many failures, I installed Windows 95.

Windows 95 is working very nicely, and I have upgraded the hard drive to 3gb, with 1.9gb for C (windows), and the rest for D (drivers). I got it connected to the internet, and installed PuTTY, Cygwin, mIRC, and Opera. I also ordered a PCMCIA wireless card, so I can connect to a wireless network.

Currently, I am looking for an X server for Windows 95 and/or a VNC client. And I plan on buying the 4MB expansion very soon.

This is a pretty fun toy to play with.