Geektaculartude!

Behold my busted, second-hand laptop.

This has been a bit of a project for me, and something I’m growing to be proud of.  It’s a Compaq Armada E500 that I bought on eBay for $35, from some computer recycling business. A couple of years ago, I screwed up my old laptop by trying to reset the CMOS battery and somehow the screen stopped working.  Not wanting to deal at the time, I tossed it and bought a netbook (which is also long-gone).

I’d been looking everywhere for a system with mostly functioning hardware and no operating system, but I hadn’t had any luck with our local recycling place.. They typically didn’t resell ones that had functioning hardware, and also I think I weirded them out when I wandered into their warehouse.  

Anyhow, I wasn’t completely stoked about getting a Compaq, but it was the only thing that had what I needed, at a price I could deal with. Apparently, this model is mostly used in corporate environments and has room for 3 batteries, bumping battery life up to 9 hours. Initially there was 128MB of RAM, no wireless capability, and again, no OS. 

I didn’t want an OS installed so I could start from scratch.  I’d been piddling with Linux distros for about a year, and although my desktop is less than a year old and came with Windows 7, everything changed when I happened upon Peppermint Ice.  I work with dingy, late-90’s, Windows 2000 machines at the office, and have no tolerance for lag issues, so I instantly fell in love.  I’d been happily using it for several months, and being a minimalist distro, I figured this fossil of a laptop could handle it. HAH!

I spent around a month testing and trying to install each and every minimalist distro in existence onto the laptop, while at the same time having thrown in the towel and installing Windows ME so I could at least make use of it.  I always had issues with the LiveCD not loading, or networking not happening even if I did get lucky enough to test it. I increased the memory by 133% and was finally able to install Peppermint Ice, though on the laptop, performance was painful and slow.

Sometime shortly after that, I stumbled upon CrunchBang, and seriously considered leaving my husband for one of the programmers.  It remains the only distro I was able to install and use wireless with. If that wasn’t enough, it’s super lightning fast, painless to use and is “Murdered Out” in appearance… Uh, hello? Black is my color! This is the end of the line.  That same night, I installed it to the desktop as well.

Pimped out with 6GB of RAM and a crazy fancy graphics card, my laptop is not, or ever will be… but I brought it to life and it’s still my work in progress.  Maybe someday, sooner than later, I’ll get the balls (and funds) to tackle more complex stuff, and perhaps even build something from scratch.

I’ll save the pro-Linux tangent for another time, but get ready… it’s coming.

#linux  #computers  #laptops  #tech  #geek  #peppermintos  #crunchbang  #computers from scratch  #geek