The first time I invested in a laptop, it was a Dell Inspiron 8200. I kitted it out quite nicely as a gaming laptop and the thing is probably the most money that I ever spent on a computer.
The only downside to it is that I could hold it and twist it slightly – it didn’t seem to be a good thing for the motherboard to have any kind of torsion on it. That being said, I looked after it. I recall taking it apart in 2006 and replacing the trackpad – parts being easily available on the internet.
I have some great memories of playing Battlefield Vietnam on this machine.
Now at some point, the fan began to get noisy. I remember opening it up once and playing around with it – a temporary fix. Later I tried more lazily to drop some oil into what someone had mentioned was a hole to the bearings. It wasn’t. I shorted the machine. It lay dormant for several years while I intended to always get around to repair. I couldn’t part with it – best keyboard on a laptop I ever had.
During the time it lay idle I ordered a new motherboard and fan. Then I forgot I ordered a new motherboard and last year I ordered another.
A few months back, I set about the repair – choosing the closest version of the available motherboards for the sake of being paranoid. The laptop came straight back to life. I had no interest in using Windows XP though and I’d archived the entire machine off to a virtual OS years ago. So I set about installing Linux and realized that I couldn’t install the versions I would consider – some had dropped 32-bit support and out of those that hadn’t, ‘lite’ options for older hardware weren’t so great.
Nevertheless, I thought Linux Mint would do it. Nope. It installed most of the way and even booted into the desktop and began taking me through keyboard and location options, but at some point it just say there thrashing the disk.
Knowing the old disk could be a problem, I pulled a hard drive I had last year wiped from another laptop I had in the recycling bin. I never thought I’d need parts from that hunk of shite. Anyway the hard drive works, but Mint even with it’s lite options got no further.
I watched a video last night speaking to installing Linux on older devices. I wish I had seen it two months ago when I was doing this repair, but the truth is having already finalized with Raspberry Pi Desktop there is probably no need to change it. Luckily this distro was recently updated – many people thought it was likely defunct.
Now, what to do with the machine. Well the funny thing is, almost all I would do with it I can do with the the Ubuntu I have installed on my Windows Subsystem for Linux (which BTW…is great).
I hope therefore to report very soon on something a little bit more nerdy.