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Windows CE on a 486 Laptop?

Hi,

I just found an old 486 crappy lappy laying around. It is running Windows 95 right now, but with its impressive 8mg of memory and less than 500mb hard drive it really flys. My question is, can I put and run Windows CE on there? I know there have been some laptop like CE devices like the IBM (z50 i think) and some from sharp, hp and others. And if you cant put wince on it, I have already figured out that Linux wont work to well on there unless its just all text. If you know of any other alternitive OS's that would run on this state of the art laptop, please let me know.

Thanks a lot!

Josh McGown


ps- also if anyone knows who the heck made the "DGi" brand of laptop, that would be greatly appreciated.

Not really.

There is not really anative version of CE for x86 processors. There is a version that you can get for development, but it doesn't have device drivers for most display cards and disk controllers. In the SDK, there is an emulator that lest's you run CE apps on a small portion of your monitor, but the environment has to be running in WINNT or WIN2K on your computer, so this is not suitable.

Even if you could make it all come together, apps are generally released for MIPS, StrongArm and Toshiba processors. There wouldn't be any commercial software that you could use.

Win CE is really not suitable for what you have in mind. I would suggest taking a look at linux or scrapping the box.

You could try QNX, why if all you need is web browsing they have an OS that can be held on a floppy.

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Matt Nichols
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