The Princess is about to leave for an au pair job in Turkey and needs a laptop for
- Web browsing
- “Facebooking”
- Transfering photographs from her phone
- Instant messaging to MSN friends
- Watching DVDs
- Skype
No problem I thought.
Your mother’s old laptop will do fine.
It wouldn’t be the end of the world if Compaq Presario 700, a machine with 248Mb of usable RAM, a 20Gb drive, USB v1.0 and no built-in wireless connectivity, came to a bad end overseas. Risk mitigation.
First, I did a fresh install of Ubuntu v9.04.
Ubuntu’s Achilles heel has been wireless communications for a long time but I haven’t had any problems at all with it on my little Asus EEE pc, still running Ubuntu v8.10, so I assumed it had all been fixed.
Wrong!
v9.04 wouldn’t offer WPA or WPA2 security. Worse, this was not a new problem — judging by some of what could be found via Google. I was a little bit surprised and disappointed. Waiting for the next release or spending time finding a workaround was a non-starter (I”ve paid my dues fooling with NDIS wrappers in the past).
On balance, I thought Linux Mint would be the next best distribution to try (PC LinuxOS would have been my next choice, based on past experience of it just working).
Bingo, the wireless worked perfectly out of the box.
YouTube and DVDs worked as expected, with no extra software required.
Eventually I got around to Skype thinking this would be straightforward. After all, if it works on Ubuntu v8.10 (that’s November 2008) … how hard could it be?
Initially it didn’t work at all. With a little playing around I got it to use the speakers, but the microphone was an insurmountable problem — I was using a headset. It worked, but so badly it might as well not have worked at all.
A separate recorder program worked well, so the problem was the combination of Skype and the hardware (though I later found someone report the same problem using Ekiga).
So…. back to Windows XP.
Thankfully Acronis TrueImage made it fairly painless to restore the last version of Windows. Apart, that is, from the length of time it took to restore 6.6Gb via a USB 1.0 port.
Next: two and half years worth of Windows updates since the last backup.
Elapsed time: about 12 hours to reimage a half-empty 20Gb drive and update Windows.
Roll on cloud computing!
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