As promised in my last post I wanted to share with you a cheap way to breath new life into an old, or otherwise busted, computer. By cheap, I mean absolutely free, which is always a good thing. At least for me. It’s something I’ve known about for a while but until recently never had to try it. Let me explain.
I use a single laptop for pretty much all my computing needs. It is what I watch videos on youtube with as well as what I write my checks with. My daughters play ABC mouse on it and watch cartoons on it. It lives within arm’s reach from me most of the time. And it rarely takes a break. I am cruel to my laptop, just plopping it on the sofa normally where it almost always ends up sliding between the arm rest and a cushion, all the while whirring away at whatever tasks I left running when I closed it.
About a month or so ago it took a nasty tumble and wouldn’t you know, in spite of it’s aluminum casing the screen cracked in several places. The screen still worked. But the glass had some nasty cracks down it. No money in the budget for a new laptop anytime soon though. So I just dealt with it. Then the curser started doing all kinds of crazy things.
I have a touchscreen on my laptop and the cracks in the glass were causing it to register touches when nothing was actually touching it. Pages would scroll. Applications would open and close. It sucked. So I disabled the drivers for touch input and everything was fine again. Well, except for the cracks. But then, a couple of weeks ago, I guess my computer had enough of my neglect and just plain quit on me. It wouldn’t even boot.
I took my hard drive out hoping I would be able to hook it up to an old desktop I have and salvage what I could of any files that were on it. Fortunately, anything really important, I always back up to dropbox. So it was mostly just photos and music files I was hoping to save. While hooked up in the desktop I was able to find out the issue. It had repeatedly operated well beyond it’s highest heat range. Remember the between cushions? I was able to get most of my photos off, but not all. But now my only really working computer had a busted screen and a completely fried hard drive. And I had exactly zero dollars for a new one. Damn. then I thought of something.
Remember the desktop I mentioned? Well the deal with that is it’s an HP that has lived out a long and healthy life and was retired into the shed. One day I read an article about turning old computers into home servers using free software that was super lightweight and easily ran on older computers. At the heart of it was Linux.
For those who don’t know, Linux is your alternative to Windows or Mac OS. It’s open source and most versions are free. Some people think it’s the greatest thing ever and others have never heard of it. But it’s an operating system. And it’s powerful. AND it’s lightweight. So lightweight it can be ran off of a zip drive. Yup. I think you know where this is heading.
So, I fired up the old desktop. Got online and downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu (Linux). Then I loaded that onto a zip drive. And then I tried it in my busted laptop….that has NO hard drive. Presto-chango! It’s alive!!!
Obviously, this is not an ideal situation. But it’s a functional one. I’m typing this on my ” Franken-puter” now. Not having a hard drive installed in the laptop means I can’t actually install Linux onto the laptop. And I cant really save ANYTHING on the computer permanently. I did have to download a couple things like flash to play video. And while operating off of the zip drive, all computer functions are saved in the RAM, meaning as soon as I turn off the power everything starts fresh again. I usually just keep it on. It’s annoying having to reinstall flash every time I start a new session if I shut down.
So that’s my computer rant for now. I’m going to go ahead and publish this tonight as-is just to get a post up. But I will come back and add links to how to download Linux and all that. It’s past my bed time. So I need to stop for the night. But remember this trick if you ever find yourself in a similar situation. Just cause it’s fried doesn’t mean it’s dead.
amended: this is the link to download Ubuntu Linux. this is the link to download UUI to make a flash drive “bootable.”
and here’s a video explaining the process…