Hello everyone,
I've had an Acer aspire 5050 from a friend, the notebook doesn't recognise hdd & dvd drive and as some of you told me in a previous topic, it's probably a mobo issue; see viewtopic.php?f=30&t=22387
well after that, I succeded in starting it with an ubuntu loaded on an usb stick but it's slow and laggy but all integrated peripherials (a part from ide controller) appears to work...

so my question is: what can I do with it??

well, I know scraping it apart and throwing away is the fastest solution, but anything more original??

let me know!!

Replace the motherboard, use a lighter distro on the USB key, PXE boot it. Your choice

Hmm… Acer Something 2346t43?

Paint it orange.

You can use it as a secure banking system with a small linux os.

Acer Aspire are rubbish the hard drives always fail anyway i managed to fix this problem, i got my windows 98 (or was it Me) disk and ran command prompt and went to the FDISK uttility and then i done other stuff. Do you have an usb external bootable dvd drive? u can boot from there. Do you have an external hard drive use that to install somethin for the meantime!

Read the original thread. It's a motherboard issue. Plus, in 2006, new computers didn't tend to run Windows 98 or Windows ME.

I used often ME(dual boot with others) in 2006 on my new computer even for OS development.
I even had freedos on the same partition.

mmh.. thanks for al suggestions!! @ finkmacunix: what do you mean by Acer Something 2346t43?? and any light distro you can suggest?? by now I tried ubuntu, kubuntu, xubuntu and backtrack 5 R1 (that appears the fastest and most stable one but wifi & audio doesn't work).
Replacing the motherboard will cost about 50 $ but the point is that I suspect (supported by searches on google) that was the entire line of this computer to be defective, so replacing will just bring me to the issue again in a few months...

P.s.: as for my personal experience, I can say Aspire's are quite good computers considering mine is from 2005 and runs wonderfully windows 7, and osx leopard (iatkos V7) I only upgraded to 2GB the ram and it's heavily used almost everyday...

I mean, it's not very collectible…

Try Lubuntu. It is lighter than Xubuntu.

I'll tell you that you could do with it empty its guts and put it back together then paint it orange and then salvage the parts for projects

harvest it for parts like the LCD screen and sell them on ebay

install android and have fun..

You could go Mythbusters on it. Other than that sell it for parts. Just keep the Hard Drive or wipe it with another computer.

mmh... till now I endend taking everything possible to use in other computers (ram, wifi card, modem, bluetooth..) and I let it lay in the garage.. for the furure, maybe I'm trying android (not so good at this time on x86 I think) or other linux distros.. I don't like much painting things, but i appreciate you suggestions

You could look online for trading services, some give money, points or even rewards!
I know swagbucks does.

I'm gonna try this I think when I'll have a little more time...

I had a computer like that, and i just hooked it up running deluge on a customized Ubuntu installation. i can add torrents and such with the web interface. all you need is a usb stick for the O.S and a external hard drive for the downloaded files. I just ftp the files to my main server when they are done.