One Man's Trash...

Late last week I inherited a hand-me-down laptop that had seen better days. It was 5 years old, the power supply did not work, the CMOS battery was dead, the DVD player does not make great contact in the bay, it did not have a floppy drive, and it looked like someone played ice hockey with it. It was very scratched up and the screen bezel has a gap. Rumor had it that an engineer bought it 5 years ago and when things started failing, rather than fixing them, he bought a new one and tossed the old one. One man's trash is another man's treasure.

So you maybe wondering why I would even bother looking at it. These are the reason I wanted to look at it:

Processor - 1.12 ghz PIII (my old one was a 633 mhz PIII)
20 gig hd (my old one was 12 gigs)
512 meg RAM (My old one had 256)
Built-in NIC (my old one had a PCMCIA card)
Wireless 802.11 B, AKA Wifi (my old one ... HAHAHA)
Bluetooth (My old one ... HAHAHA)
Very sharp display with very few scratches (My old one ... HAHA...err.. you get the idea. The screen was very scratched)
5.5 lbs (My old one weighed 7+ lbs)
The mouse works (on my old one the stick did not work at all and the touch pad was far too sensitive no matter how much I tweaked the config files and the PS 2 port did not work)

Now the old one had some pluses: Spare battery, car charger, floppy drive and dvd player, and it was sturdy. However I felt that the pluses outweighed the minus in this case. Now if I have to boot to a CD, I may be screwed. During boot it says that it cannot connect to the DVD-ROM and to check the cables. Well, it works when the machine is running so it looks like some sort of BIOS issue. I cannot find anything that would indicate that it is set up incorrectly, so I may have to see if a BIOS flash will work. I will not investigate that until I get to the point that the machine will not boot with the OS correctly and I cannot boot with the CD.

Now, the progress I have made:

I found a working power supply in the recycle bin at work. I charged the battery and after letting it charge for several hours, I installed Ubuntu 6.10. After the battery had charged for 24 hours, the CMOS battery was able to keep a charge well enough to keep the RTC (Real Time Clock) accurate without staying plugged in and turned on all the time.

Next I began tweaking the OS. I ran into some odd issues that I did not run into the other 4-5 times I have installed 6.10, but a little research fixed them. I tweaked Firefox, shared out my home directory, installed SAMBA and got it on the network via CAT 5. I tested the DVD player and once I got the proper free codecs, it played a Christian Rock DVD sampler quite well. I did have to install some extra codecs to have the ability to play Microsoft media formats, but that was not a big deal. Once those were installed I was able to watch videos from CNN's web site without a problem.

I tested the USB ports and was able to read my USB thumb drive on the first try without any issues. I still have other USB things to try, but I think that I will be successful. However only time will tell.

After I got my Linksys WRT54G working (flashed the firmware and allowed it to "acquire" the settings from Time-Warner ... I think I cloned my MAC address to, just to make sure it would work), I set up WEP on the router and on the laptop and was able to connect wirelessly. The only thing that bothered me initially (and it only happened the first night) was that the signal strength indicator was very low on the laptop display and I was right next to the router. The following days I was able to use the laptop without any noticeable lag from the kitchen and the bedroom (the rooms furthest from the router). I was happy.

I was trying to figure out how to test Bluetooth on the laptop but was not sure how. I read on the web site that you have to toggle Bluetooth on and off opposite the WiFi meaning that you cannot have WiFi and Bluetooth running at the same time. I read how to do that and thought to myself, "How do I test it?" My wife's mobile phone has Bluetooth so I figured I would try to transfer some pics she took with her phone to my laptop. Well after installing most everything I could find and researching for about 30 minutes, I was ready to try. I turned on Bluetooth on my wife's phone and then toggled the laptop to Bluetooth mode. I then told the phone to detect other Bluetooth devices in range. Since the laptop was only a few inches from the phone, I knew distance would not be a factor. Well, the phone never detected the laptop. I tried a few things but after about an hour or so I gave up. Now the reason I am not too upset is that it is possible that the Buetooth on the laptop is broken..it is after all a hockey puck. I have one last way of checking and that will be with my work laptop. I think it has Bluetooth as well

Down, but not out, I started cleaning the thing up. I took some special anti-static cleaning wipes designed specifically for electronics and cleaned up the laptop as best as I could. I was thinking that I could paint it with some plastics paint, but decided not to. It looks rough so maybe it will be less of a temptation to steal.

The last thing I did was name it. I decided on the name, "hockey-puck" in honor of he the condition I found it in. The name fits. I figure a few Ubuntu stickers on it and it will be perfect.

Now overall, I am thinking that this may be my new main pc for home use. I will need to copy a lot of personal files (home directory and some config files that will be difficult to recreate) but I think it is possible. It is not near as fast as the 3 ghz PC that I dual boot, but...I think I can survive.

Now I have been using this around the house from every room and have been pleased so far with the performance. I feel sorry for the guy who tossed it. While it is worth nowhere near what it was when it was new ($3500.00) it still performs quite well. At least it performs better than the 633 mhz laptop it replaced.

I will keep you posted on my progess, but I think we have a winner here.