What does a kid think of a laptop from 1997?

I’m redecorating right now. We’ve had to wait quite a while due to the coronavirus lockdown, but now things are finally moving forward. A new cupboard has been constructed, I’ve ripped all the skirting board off and the plasterer has been in. Last night I moved onto installing downlights into our bedroom. It involves a lot of cabling, a lot of mathematics and a lot of clambering around in the loft.

This, then, is where I started to get distracted. There’s boxes and boxes of random stuff in the loft that needs to be moved so that I can put the cabling and light fittings into place. First, I moved box number one and got covered in Christmas decorations. Then I moved box number two and lots of old photos fell out.

My Peugeot 205 GTi. Still wish I had it.

Yeah, I spent over an hour looking at them, then another hour. These were photos from the pre-digital era, when you only ever took photos on film and had them developed. They’re not stored on a hard drive anywhere, so I become massively peoccupied.

Many hours later, I moved onto the next box, and it was heavy. Very heavy. I couldn’t understand why, but after digging down I found this Compaq Armada 1510 laptop.

It’s from many, many years ago – originally launched in 1997. Powered by a 120MHz Intel Pentium CPU and fearturing an IDE PC Card (PCMCIA) this was my laptop once. In fact, I used it when this site first came into being back in 2003 (yes, we’ve been online over 17 years).

Windows 98 runs (just about) on this – it’s got a massive 32MB of RAM and was sold, back in the day, as “the laptop for users who require maximum performance in a mainstream Laptop”.

It’s hugely thick. It’s really heavy. The screen is terrible (it’s a bit broken) and it takes forever to boot. So what would a 12 year-old kid think of it? Well, I gave it to my son to find out…

Whats your thoughts? Bin it or keep it?