[K12OSN] Old, Creaky Toshiba 2100CDS Laptops As Clients?

[Tom Simpson]

Hi:

I'm an instructional technolgy support type with a smallish, poorish
school district in South Carolina, and I hate throwing away old equpment
that still has some life in it.

We have a stack of old Toshiba Sattelite 2100CDS notebooks that were
part of a "Classroom In A Cart" initiative from about 1999 or so that
has fallen into a state of disrepair, with stripped carts, dead
batteries and ill-maintained notebooks strewn across my dozen-plus
schools like so many fallen soldiers. We are talking about K6-2 400mHz
machines with 96 megs o' RAM...sounds like more than enough to work as
K12LTSP clients, no?

They were originaly set up to work with Aironet wireless PCMCIA NICs and
have no wired NIC built in, so I pretty much have to go wireless or go
with a wired PCMCIA NIC. I could set the 4gig hard drives up to kick off
the boot process, but how that fits with the PCMCIA NICs, I have no
clue. All I have at the moment in the way of PCMCIA NICs to play with at
the moment is an old TI 10BASE-T card. Not what you want to end up with,
but for testing purposes...

Anyway, I was just wondering if anybody had much experience with setting
up old laptops like this.

TIA
-Tom