Lapdancing
And so the saga of the laptop continues.
I received a mail yesterday saying that my laptop had been delivered. Hah! thinks I, they have lost the plot. Just to be on the safe side though I checked my CCTV to see if there had been any visitors. There hadn’t, but there on the live camera I could see something leaning against the inside of the front gate.
It was a package.
The lazy fuckers couldn’t even be arsed to open the gate and had just dropped it there. I brought it in and opened it up.
It’s a Dell Inspiron 17 3000 [if you want the full name].
Now this is the machine that I paid for and which got lost. It was written off and I got a rebate. I had of course ordered another from Dell themselves, so I cancelled that order too. So now I have a new laptop that I haven’t paid for.
It’s a lovely machine – very fast and with an enormous screen [for a laptop]. Naturally the first thing I did with it was to stick in a Linux USB stick thingy and reboot. It refused to read the USB. I looked for the manual. There wasn’t one.
Eventually I got the USB to work and loaded Linux. Brilliant! It runs like the clappers.
I booted back into WIndows. It fucked up the disk and all I gut was a blank screen displaying “grub>”. Fuck!
I booted in again using the Linux USB and ran a little program called “Boot Repair”. It failed. Fuckfuck!
I rebooted yet again and found that in fact it had worked so I was able to get into either WIndows or Linux. Great. I loaded all my programmes and am all set to go. Except that for some reason, some of my Linux settings are different and I can’t for the life of me work out why. Most are trivial but some are very important [see under “vital”]. Bugger!
In case anyone is wondering what I am doing instead of scribbling, I have started on another project.
Linux Mint is my usual home with all my programs and Interweb stuff. But WIndows now only has Word on it, and no networks access. So the only thing I can do on it is write. The idea is that I have no distractions; no Interweb; no mail; no games; no nothing. So I have started on The Book yet again, but instead of trying to fix my previous efforts I’m starting from scratch. I go into Linux to read mail and the like and then I go into WIndows for the rest of the day where I am isolated.
It’s going quite well.
It was actually storming along until a new laptop dropped out of the sky and distracted me.
Nice machine
It's an excellent machine [so far]. No having to repeatedly having to go back on my scribbling to insert missing letters.
It is also brilliant value for money!
The idea of being deliberately isolated on Windows sounds a delight. Spending my day on Microsoft Teams, when I am not meant to be isolated, I suspect there are large number of students who are not following the lessons.
Watch their faces closely to see if they blink or move. I bet half have stuck a photo of themselves in front of the webcam and then buggered off to their Playstation or Xbox or whatever.
I put an SSD in my Dell and one in my Acer. Fabulous, I couldn't believe the increase in speed, especially when booting. Like from 90 seconds to 5. Maybe 10 these days. Nay bad.
I thought this machine was to have an SSD but apparently it doesn't [the one I ordered off Dell did]. It has a 1Tb HDD instead. I'm not worried about load time [I'm in no hurry and wouldn't know what to do with those extra seconds anyway]. It must have a fairly good chip though as processing is very fast.
In the same way that people used to ask why main memory was called "core", it won't be long before people start asking why these little rectangular PCbs with chips on are called "disks"
It took them long enough to stop using "floppies"!
I did a bit of research on this machine and Dell apparently stuck some
bloatwareDell support software that makes backups when running its scheduled tasks. It's more important with an SSD but it can still fill things up even with a hard drive. Me? I'd yank it but it's up to you of course.No networking? On a Dell installed Windows 10? Something is wrong there but maybe it's for the best? The safest Windows installation is the one that's offline.
There are quite a few pre installed programmes all right, but I just ignore them. I'm not worried [for now] about space as it has a 1Tb disk.
When I say no networking I mean that Windows doesn't automatically connect to the Wifi, though of course it could if I told it to. I just leave it switched off to avoid distractions.
One interesting factoid about this machine is that it's the first laptop running Linux that has been able to connect to the 5Ghz band. All previous machines could only see the 2.4.
I find it very odd that they still make laptops that only see 2.4 Ghz and not 5 Ghz. We have two ancient Lenovo Thinkpads (R61s circa 2008) and one dead T43 (circa 2015?) and all 3 were capable of both 2.4 and 5 Ghz WiFi connections. If Lenovo could do that why couldn't other brands? Cheap bastards?
On a personal note, since our 8 wireless security cameras use the 2.4 Ghz band only (and only 4 channels at that) I had to disable the 2.4 Ghz WiFi at the router/modem so the laptops only hooked up to the 5 Ghz band. If 2.4 Ghz was enabled the laptops would hook up to that first with little to no throughput because of the cameras interfering with the signal.
If I do get myself a new laptop it's going to have to have both WiFi bands, not just 2.4.
Er…. *cough* …. it was Linux at fault in the past. My previous machines saw the 5Ghz in Windows, but as far as Linux was concerned there was only 2.4. It was purely a case of the drivers not recognising the hardware and using a generic catch-all driver. When I first fired up Mint on this machine the top choice for connecting was my 5Ghz router. I was delighted.
When I first set up Wifi here in the wilds mine was the only signal. Now there's a dozen or so to choose from!