Maybe it is my heritage DNA, but in some areas I tend to be pragmatic (strong beliefs, loosely held) when it comes to PCs, as well as a bit frugal in that I am not fond of throwing away something that has potential value.
Above you will see my wife’s old (vintage 2010) Dell PC that had been running Windows 7 when it finally would not load the OS maybe 2 years ago. We bought a replacement Lenovo PC that had Windows 8 on it in 2016 and earlier this year due to some Windows 10 frustrations we bought yet another PC, this one a Dell with Windows 10 on it “out of the box”.
All this to say that just a few minutes ago, on the Lenovo PC, that since my wife’s frustrations with reboots happening with no warning, CPU fan running hot because some Microsoft process (that does not always show up in Process Manager) is busy, or MS Photos is making an album that NO ONE asked for .. was killing my Hewlett Packard scanning software every 30 minutes. Come to find out, it is an W10 update that MS wants to push to my PC so bad that instead of telling me, it just upsets my PC to the point that I have to look for the root issue:
OK. So this happened on a PC that I had earlier this year placed a FRESH W10 OS on from scratch. What good is an unstable OS that prioritizes its agenda over the user’s?
Back to the pragmatic part, just this week I finally took at look at my wife’s oldest laptop (Dell vintage 2010) and tried to “repair” the OS. After a few days of being able to clean up the hard disk drive (HDD) from bad disk areas (using “chkdsk”) ..
.. I still was not able to repair the Windows 7 operating system enough to have it boot successfully. I was however able to navigate through the hard drive contents with DOS to ensure that there was nothing on this HDD that I did not already have somewhere else.
SO I decided to try and install Linux on this old PC and use Linux tools to identify/repair/ignore the bad spots on this old HDD. Having a background in UNIX from the 1990s and Linux since 2005 helps, but as you will see below, there are Internet resources that make this pretty much plug and play. The decision to go Linux is:
- There is NO costs (other than ones time) to try this (Windows requires payment for the OS whether you can use it or not)
- There is MUCH more control over WHEN or IF your PC get OS updates!
Following the information at this page, one has all the step necessary to put Linux on any PC that has 2GB RAM, functioning HDD and preferably a good USB port (instead of loading the OS via a DVD drive which is much more prone to errors):
From here I downloaded a few pieces of software to my existing W10 PC so I could created a boot-able USB stick .. one of which was Etcher which does the job like a champ:
Following the instructions it was great to see the old PC come back to life!
While I did have to accomplish some post installation fixes due to my defective HDD using Linux’s “fsck” tool, reloading the Linux Mint 19.1 OS one last time was a great milestone in “redeeming” this old laptop for future value.
After test driving this Linux laptop for a few months, I have another, newer W10 PC laptop that might be in line for this process.
A side-note, for those that might be resistant to break totally from Windows, there is a Linux package called “Wine” that will give you a Windows experience on your Linux PC. How is THAT for open-source marketing?
Again, this all might be part of my Dutch DNA, according to this slideshow about startups and the Dutch culture:
Enjoy the rest of your weekend y’all and back to more normal posting to come in the next few days after a round of some PC distrations.
-SF1