Just got my first laptop, t22

[38sho]

hey I just got my first laptop, its a T22

runs windows 98 and is all stock I think

tried to play a DVD in it and the player shakes all to hell and vibrates loud, wonder if that is normal or should I replace it?

what kind of upgrades can you do for the DVD player? I'm new to the whole laptop world and some of the terminology or port/connector names

I'd like to do a windows upgrade, hard drive upgrade for sure, and some ram, is 512mb ram the max for my laptop?

also contemplating some sort of wifi solution, I'll be searching around the boards for some answers to these questions but feel free to fill me in if you wish!

[Brian10161]

One thing I can tell you regarding the DVD drive is that some discs tend to be poorly balanced (if at all). Try another disc, and if you can, try a CD-R or something like that. They tend to be a little better.

It's usually the weight of the graphic they put on the disc that throws it off.

[ajkula66]

Welcome to the forum!

512MB is indeed the maximum RAM you can have in a T22.

Hard drive upgrade...any PATA/IDE laptop drive will work. Figure out your space requirements and your budget and we'll take it from there.

XP will run OK especially if it's slightly slimmed-down. Anything newer than that would be a huge stretch.

A PCMCIA wireless card is likely the easiest solution.

Have fun.

[pianowizard]

I'd like to do a windows upgrade, hard drive upgrade for sure, and some ram, is 512mb ram the max for my laptop? also contemplating some sort of wifi solution

Welcome to the forum!

The T22 is a very old laptop and is worth no more than $50 these days. Even if you upgrade everything to the max, it would still be very slow and can barely run Windows XP, and these upgrades are so expensive that they are just not worthwhile. If you want to buy a reasonably powerful laptop, tell us your requirements and we will give you some pointers. For example, tell us what your budget is, what applications you want to run, what screen size you want, etc.

[jasew503]

pianowizard: "The T22 is a very old laptop and is worth no more than $50 these days. Even if you upgrade everything to the max, it would still be very slow and can barely run Windows XP, and these upgrades are so expensive that they are just not worthwhile. If you want to buy a reasonably powerful laptop, tell us your requirements and we will give you some pointers. For example, tell us what your budget is, what applications you want to run, what screen size you want, etc."


I disagree. I just sold a T22 today for $70 on craigslist to the first person that called within 15 minutes of posting my ad, and my phone continued to blow up for an hour afterwords until I deleted the ad.

I had also installed a fresh copy of WinXP Pro SP2 and it ran rock solid and extremely well with the 900Mhz P3/256MB ram on a old, slow, loud 10GB Hitachi HD with bad sectors. It even streamed youtube videos with google chrome without issue.

Im also typing this reply on a T21 with an 800Mhz P3/256MB 20GB 4800RPM Fujitsu HD, and configured exactly the same. Even tho the cpu is slower, the performance drop is almost non-existant, and Ive been preferring it over my T41p all day for web browsing. Better feel and more solid in general, I can toss it around and it wont give me trouble.

Sure, my MB Pro could whoop its butt when it comes to running pro tools, but I continue to be amazed at the performance from these old machines....

[pianowizard]

I disagree. I just sold a T22 today for $70 on craigslist to the first person that called within 15 minutes of posting my ad, and my phone continued to blow up for an hour afterwords until I deleted the ad...I had also installed a fresh copy of WinXP Pro SP2 and it ran rock solid and extremely well with the 900Mhz P3/256MB ram on a old, slow, loud 10GB Hitachi HD with bad sectors.

I was referring to running Windows XP Pro with SP3, all the updates, and a virus scanner that's constantly running. Computers run much faster with only SP2 and with the virus scanner turned off.

I have sold many computers on Craigslist and it's always very easy to sell sub-$100 laptops, because there are lots of local folks who know little about how much these laptops are worth. The OP was considering upgrading Windows, the DVD drive, RAM, the hard drive, and wireless, which would cost a lot of money. It would be better to spend that money on a T60 and then sell his/her T20 for $50.

[jasew503]

Gotcha, Yeah ive never realy paid attention to the speed differences between SP2 and SP3 in XP, I would assume it would be slower since XP SP3 was really slow on an old Armada M700 with a P3-900 and 256MB RAM, and i remember a huge hit in performance when I upgraded to XP's SP1 or 2 (cant remember) on an Evo N1020c P4-2.4 Machine with 512MB Ram from the base XP Pro install, but I assumed it was the machines themselves since most of compaq's portables seem to be junk anyways.