oooooh - 2 Gb* limit! That is wonderful news, I'm definitely going to do that upgrade, but I'm going to renege on swapping up to SSD for the time being. I have a 128GB ssdNow V+ from the 2008 Lenovo X300 - motherboard/daughterboard BS where if either fails, the consumer is up for a new lappie or the cost of replacing a new twinned mbo/daughterboard. Programmed obsolescence was becoming to be widely recognised by the public, by that stage.
So to get back to the OP, and to reiterate what others have already stated in the thread regarding "extremely old" laptop builds (in no particular order):
1. Know your particular beast - hunt around for its maximum specs, with a mind that the Industry might want to conceal the limits of what your machine is actually capable of (Cheers to Mike Walsh above),
a. Spread the load - it's widely recognised that by "maxing out" your RAM, HDD/SDD and CPU specs you actually protect the longevity of the motherboard - and, by extension, the life of the other components.
b. Puppy's particular genius (lets not get started
) is to disperse the processing more effectively that MicroSoft and the industry could ever consider, so the wear is more on the cheaper and replaceable RAM rather than the sometimes-welded on CPU, and write-cycles are also reduced to increase the life of the HDD. (I'm skimming my understanding - please correct me if wrong).
c. Tools like Hirens or Ultimate Boot CD can help you suss out your vital statistics regarding the motherboard, bios, RAM and HDD fitness etc before you consider your time and money outlay in a rebuild project,
2. Update the BIOS to the most recently-supported version - and perhaps the FreeBIOS/linuxBIOS/coreboot project could be of additional help to upgrade your machine - but I haven't tried that route yet,
3. Manually clean it out - open her up, keep track of the different screws in separate containers and take photos as you go so you can retrace your steps putting it all back together. Steer clear of using the household vacuum which can be bad mojo for the electrostatically-sensitive innards, canned air is gold-standard (but you could use a blow gun kit and the air from your car tyres to do the job... pays for itself after a few computer cleanouts I've found
). Special attention to the vents and fans, use good quality q-tips with a smidge of alcohol of the non-drinking kind and get all the gunk off the blades. I've also used a drop of sewing oil in the bearings for overnight marinating but doesn't seem to last as long as I hoped when replaced, have got by with replacement fan+heatsink units but now will just replace the fans - not like the copper spreader wears out,
4. Replace the thermal paste/thermal grease on the old CPU/heatblock sink unit. My last project (the Dell 1100) was so baked together I had to use dental floss to saw it apart and it took about 40 minutes of hard graft - never use screwdrivers etc to do the job,
5. Take the process of getting it all back together again calmly and systematically - lost count of the number of times a wifi card etc wasn't properly seated or re-attached. Those extra screws I find after a job are always handy though
,
6. If you are reading this far, if at all, you know that you should remove the malware entirely (generally XP or Vista) and wipe the drive completely for Puppy in the more antiquated builds. Frugal installs have always been my preference, for reasons that are thoroughly debated elsewhere on the forum. I confess to generally always keeping the resident M$ there anyway, after a lengthy process using tools like CCcleaner and defragging (in the IDE/PATA HDD's) with something like Ultimate Defrag etc, before re- partitioning with Gparted for a dual boot with Puppy(ies) on an ext2 or ext3 partition.
Good Luck and Happy Recycling
P.S. I don't know how it holds up against the most recent range of laptop productions, but I seem to recall an industry-wide "sweet spot" of laptop manufacture from about 2001-2007 that even Linus Torvalds wrote about... (but I can't reference ATM) so spending a bit of effort really saves in the long haul.
*Was gifted an old Vaio VGN-TX37GP (2006ish) that had been progressively hemorrhaging under the weight of XPpro and 1Gb RAM. Maxed it out to 1.5Gb RAM (now I'm not so sure, re Mike Walsh's post!) and the lift in speed was palpable - my favourite "go-to" machine without doubt now, once I tested a range of Series 5 and Series 6 Pupplets on it. A version of TahrPup 6.05 is absolutely fanging on that one even with the old HDD. Can't wait to see what a RAM upgrade will do for the Dell 1100... (bummer about the experiences with far-Eastern (my near-Northern) RAM replacements... had me a few postage-free, sub-$5 SODIMM trinkets lined up for purchase before I came to the end of Mike's post, above)
UPDATE:
P.P.S. Mike and other Dell 1100 "tragics" - don't think that you are limited to PC2100 DDR for the 845GL either, like in the first link Mike posted in the previous post. I have a 512Mb PC2700 (2004 vintage!) in mine working with the 256 PC2100, and I caught another user on a Dell forum stating similar. Onwards and upwards!