Tiny N18 lol! graphic chipset problem

[BitisGabonica]

Hi all, im about to inherit a laptop from a family member, its an old heavy TINY thing...the n18 with a celery 2.4 cpu and maybe only 256 ram.....ok thats all fine it would be solely for office and email duties....

the problem is after a fresh xp pro with sp2 install, and general updaing....i cannot find out what the graphics driver it needs are, when i open display properties it says "default monitor running on : *nothing* " LOL so that didnt help, also i looked around device manager......that didnt help...* i cannot visually remember all of the items but if i saw any graphics chipsets/devices i would be ok*

also when i asked about these drivers either here or elsewhere staing the full model version/number......no one seems to know what drivers it needs are, its also one of the ones from hell whats the word for the ones the cheap ones..where you cannot remove the battery ..its one of them, but anyhow does anyone know the drivers it needs? do any of you have a fully functional one sitting there which you could use to just get the name of the graphics chipset? card whatever you call it? or know off hand which one it is/?


Thanks for reading - karl aka bitis

[jdrom17]

What brand is this laptop. N18 really doesn't tell me much.

[AKHandyman]

Yeah, we need to know who the manufacturer is ... and a model number ... and welcome to PCSTATS Forums! :)

[stlouis1]

yeah, that you'll need to look up on the manufacturers site with the model and they should have the driver listed for download

[jdrom17]

lol, the company is Tiny Computers and the model is N18...

Tiny went out of business in July 2005 apparently. Going to be tough.

[yahooadam]

256mb ram & XP = ouch

even 512mb is pretty bad

[BitisGabonica]

hi all! this thread is realllly old....but i made some really good discoveries....

i found the graphics drivers...sis 661fx....and!! it had 512 ram in it....i used cupid / cpuz to look.....then i found out it had 2 different modules in it...one pc 2700 and one ....slower, also one was 2.5 v the other only 2.0....... so i removed the slower one put an old 512 ddr 2700 in place of it....booted up VIOLA!!! but i suspect it will at least run ddr400.... because it has an L2 cache...only a little 256kb one but it has one....and my old celery desktop that was 2.0 ghz did not have one....and it supported 200ddrx2 = 400mhz....

what a happy day its been! i mean ok its nothing special.... celeron D 320 ...2400Mhz , now on 768mb pc2700.....has a dvdrw....and shared graphics but it goes up to 28mb so it may "run" vista if i put the best ram it can handle in it.... only has a 40gb ide drive i guess at only 5400 rpm... but hell it was free!!!

added bonus was the battery is replacable, and it uses full size DIMMs...... desktop (is it 240pin) ram modules , that was sooooo handy

does anyone know if this would handle old duel channel ram? actually buying DDR is a silly thing now though with the fact ddr2 is so cheap because of ddr3.....but it might be worth hunting around second hand items ?

[jdrom17]

I really wouldn't put Vista on it. I think something like Ubuntu would probably go nicely though if you don't want XP.

I doubt you'd see a difference from PC2700 to PC3200. 768MB of RAM is decent considering that it's only a Celeron.

[BitisGabonica]

Thanks.....i think i will leave the ram now....it seems to be runing well with it...on an old xp installation that had been mangled by the previouss owner...76$ through getting ubuntu...i had a play with some other unix/linux ones and they were quite nice...one had a quite flashy gui also, i want to start simple...like i did on windows lol then when i get more adventurous il look around at some more technical versions when i learn a few command line.. commands!

one more question....do any of you know any windows programs that can help identify motherboards? i tried cpuz...or cpuid...it just said "to be filled in by the OEM" lol or something like it!

so i can find the drivers and such for when i put ubuntu on it :)

[yahooadam]

its usually the bits on the motherboard that are a problem

Sound (for modern stuff), wireless (depending how new, or on the maker) and graphics drivers are the tough bits

most things work out the box

Just boot a ubuntu livecd and see what doesn't work, if its like >6 months old its probably fine