Resurrecting A Dinosaur Laptop
Posted by ryan on September 28, 2009 | Filed under Tech
This week I ended up with a dinosaur laptop in my possession. I’m not exaggerating when I say that this thing is a piece of junk. I also have no inhibition in protesting that I fashion Toshiba laptops the Yugo of the industry. For those of you who don’t know, Yugo cars were around in the 80s, and they were one of the few cars that dealers had to worry about breaking down before they got within walking distance from the dealership.
The laptop in question is one of the oldest Pentium 4 laptops. A very slow 4200rpm hard drive and a challenged ram situation (512mb) made Windows run very slow on this piece. A majorly hosed up Windows installation to boot, another tech pun, made it just freeze in place and get choppy even moving the cursor or playing an mp3. Who knows who the original owner was, any chance of getting the driver CDs or original Windows installation disc are very slim.
Driver and Operating System reinstall discs can be acquired for a laptop like this. The older the computer, the harder it is to do. In the case of the old Toshiba, it is probably circling the drain anyway, so I would never spend the time.
The Snowball’s Chance
Download Ubuntu Linux
I’m naming the old Toshiba, you guessed it, Snowball!
I’m writing this blog post from it right now. The savior? Ubuntu Linux.
Ubuntu is a distribution, or one organizations particluar flavor, of the free, open-source operating system Linux. One of the major innovations that all distributions have been working towards lately is ease of use. For a long time, Linux was only for the more technical user. Even simple tasks like installing software required research, reading and sometimes a lot of forum thread conversations to get through. Ubuntu has made it a quick solution, installation will involve more mouse clicks than keystrokes.
Use It
I downloaded the installation CD, burned it to a disc, booted and began the OS install. Less than an hour later I was booting into Ubuntu for the first time. After setting up e-mail, chat and flash for the web browser, I began being productive. I took a desktop screenshot and a picture with my iPhone, edited the pictures with Gimp, then uploaded them and wrote this WordPress using Firefox and the quickly installed Flash plugin.
Ubuntu runs on almost any computer, is more efficient with resources than Windows, and is vastly less susceptible to viruses. It is a great way to do the basics, e-mail, chat and web browsing, costs nothing, and is easy to install.
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