Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Back to old laptop hell

My friend Alice has an old laptop (thinkpad 390x) which locked up because Windows 2000 insisted that she should change her password. She didn't remember her password so it became useless. I sold it to her about a year ago so I offered to repair it.
My first effort was to load a relatively new Linux (Mandriva 2006) on it. It worked except for the sound card, which produced garbage. I then tried Suse Linux 10.0. It had the same problem. I then went back to Windows 2000, after having to load Windows 98 to get 2000 to load. 2000 works pretty well with the wifi card and the sound card.
The wifi card won't work at Bookends and Beans which is only 2 houses away from her home. Bookends uses a password protection that Windows 2000 isn't up to.
I think I'll concentrate on getting Windows 2000 to work. It will take a day of downloading updates, including 4 service packs. Oh well, I guess I needed a project for a rainy day. I think I'll hang out at Magpies and use their wifi since it is the fastest around. I'm at the co-op now and theirs might be almost as fast.
I'm tempted to download some newer operating systems and seeing if I can get that sound card to work with the latest Linux. I can't use Ubuntu, which I really like, because Alice's machine only has 190 meg of RAM. The latest Ubuntu needs 256 meg.
I think I'll download the latest Mandriva now and see if I can get it to work. I've got it on one of my desktops and I'm pretty happy with it.
I made progress with my camera the other day. After enhancing some pictures I had something I wouldn't mind uploading onto this blog. After I fix Alice's machine I'll do that.
That all for now

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