All right. As of yesterday, I'm the new owner of an HP OmniBook XE3L. It's got 10gb of memory, and is currently running Windows XP Standard Mandarin edition. Yes. (It originally ran Windows ME).

Yeah, it's almost five years old. Scoff all you want, but I'd like to get it running well enough to be my new university notebook/portable writing desk for Craccum articles, reviews, et cetera.

Is it possible for me to do the following at reasonable cost, considering that the laptop was free?

1) Get a replacement battery? (The old one has vanished, so at present I only have mains power :( )

2) Replace XP Mandarin Edition with another copy of XP without getting gang raped by Microsoft's legal team?

3) Get a copy of MS Word or Office onto it, also without being violated by Microsoft's legal goon squad?

All suggestions appreciated.

There are certain Computer Science, Information Systems, and probably Software Engineering papers that can borrow the uni version of Windows XP. Find a friend who does such a paper and bribe them to get it from the resource center in the Maths & Physics building.

PM me about this one ;).

if all else fails, bittorrent is your friend :). but if I were you I would install an older version of office onto there, the new ones might run crappy on a 5 year old machine

if I were u I'd dump XP as well. If you must got windows then stick with 2000

Awesome, guys.

Is there any hope of finding a replacement battery pack somewhere??

trademe

Is $150 too much to pay for one of these battery packs, (allegedly) brand new? It was here on TradeMe.

I'd wanted to get this whole compy up and running for under $100 if possible. Or should I just cough up and get exactly what I want?

Just use open source stuff I say for the software, but I'm not sure about battery packs and such like.
I would have cannibalised my old laptop's one for you, but I gave it to my sister who uses it now as her primary computer.

Firstly if u check the trademe link out and then go the refering link... u'll see that they only charge $144 plus p&p from the site. But then again the trademe account and the website are the same person

Personally I couldnt find any battery listings on pricespy... but a quick search shows that thats about what the battery is worth new.

Well Oob sorted me out for software :bowdown: so all I need is to get one of those batteries. I may buy new rather than chance it on Trademe, I think.