You could have simply run an old program that soft formats the blank sectors after you deleted her stuff. Windows 98 could probably have been installed on it. That machine would be perfect for a kindergardner to say second or third grade possibly a bit more kid to do homework on. Having those older machines frees up a families main computer that is internet capable from being used to do homework. The kid gets what is needed using the family main computer and transfers it to a thumbdrive to down load to their own personal laptop that does not need net access to get homework done. All my nephews kids have their own older machines even the seven year old as I set his machine up so he could play a stackload of learning games plus a full older Office package and video players so he can even watch DVDs on his own machine. Homework gets done no excuses.

Three years ago I was helping my niece with her catoring busness. I ran the 5k watt sound system using multiple laptops the least powerful was a Windows 95 machine but Winamp worked fine on it. I had one machine with the clients play list. One machine with my many gig music collection and one machine tapped in to the buildings wifi so I could pull up odd requests off the net.

.....

I use an old Notebook thats slow as F to run Pandora through my home stereo using a patch chord out the headphone jack.

Its all itll do...but.

To be truly vintage, it needs a well known OEM nameplate, like IBM, Apple for laptops.

For others (not laptops), TI, Commodore, Ohio Scientific, Radio Shack, Sinclair, Acorn, and the like. Mainly NON-IBM compatible.

Sell, Gateway, Toshibas are all dime a dozen.

Those early traveling salesman models from the 1980s have some value as curiosities. Past that, none. All the vintage computer hardware action is in consoles and games, mainly because you can turn them on and use them. Nothing interesting runs on those old 1980s laptops unless you're a fan of VisiCalc or text-only video games. One from 1997 isn't much better.

Well with a stage name of Caveman Jim you would probably have figured out that I don’t care and do not want to know about computers. Thanks for all the in depth information and light banter.
I like woodworking, gunz, fishin & huntin to keep my life simple.

My first laptop.. T2105CS

Lots of Doom was played on that..

My first was a 286. Then built my own 386 and eventually a 486.

RAM was $300 a megabyte. Yes, a MEGATBITEME.

FYI, I'd been using computers since 1981.

Now we are dating out selves!
My first was fir christmas in 1980. Brand new TRS 80.
Hey it had 64KB of memory and its own tape recorder for its storage. Even came with a couple cassette tapes.
Seem to remember buying my first hard drive a few years later for around $500. (Eqiv to todays prices that would be about 4000) it was amazing to have 16 mega bytes to use. What was i going to do with all that space.

Sent from my SM-G973U using Tapatalk

So those of you that had computers back in those days were definitely not the group of kids (me) that were out till the street lights came on obviously.

http://www.6502.org/trainers/synertek/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_6502
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilog_Z80
My Dad had me hold computer board he was soldering for his Synertek SYM. He expended the memory to 1K.
The 6502 CPU was the common ground for a lot of later computers: Apple ][, Commodore PET, Ohio Scientific. But Mos Tech never made a successful successor to the 6502 and others from Intel and Motorola took over. (Neither did Zilog that the TRS 80 used).