Stayin alive...

After the CD drive failed, my jurassic Acer Aspire 3000 was reduced to a helpless and obsolete laptop relying on its two USB ports for data I/O. After the operating system crashed a month ago(after a long 5 year run), I was left clueless as to how to get it back. Wintoflash came to the rescue and a new Windows xp was up an running in 3o mintes thanks to the USB boot function on the mobo. But the worst was yet to come.

I was installing essential softwares like VLC and foxit when the OS crashed with a BSOD. Now what?
On restarting, it refused to boot and gave HAL error. I knew it could mean a hard drive fault or misplaced some issue with the drivers. I tried booting from the flash drive again, no luck.

256 MB of RAM and a paltry old AMD processor can't handle new age OSes like vista and w7 so I decided to install a linux distro on it. The laptop was pretty much obsolete anyway, a few basic functions like music playback, videos and occasional notes is good enough for me.

I started with Linux Mint. I knew new versions of linux like Ubuntu(hardy heron, ibex and all) wouldn't work.
But it turned out Mint was too much too, it dragged and crawled through windows. I then tried installing Moblin, it a gave a low memory error and stopped. Then tried fedora, no luck.

After some research on the internet, came across PCOSlinux, designed for older hardware. Installation took a mere 20 minutes and the laptops's back to life....for now atleast.