Trials and Tribulations

No sooner did I get Chrome OS Flex installed on my Mac Book than the charger gave out. It had been playing up for a couple of days beforehand, alternating between charging and not charging, until it finally died. This now dead charger I bought online about a year or so ago (to replace the original) so it's had a relatively short lifespan. I've ordered a new one and it should arrive today. I'm hoping it's the charger that is the problem and not the battery itself. If the latter, then that may be the end of my laptop. In the meantime, I'll remain optimistic.

In the absence of a functioning computer, I turned to my granddaughter's HP Pavilion x360 that I bought for her about four years ago and which she seldom uses, preferring instead her 2020 iPad Pro. The computer ran Windows 10 and she said that she sometimes plays games on it. When I first used it, it took forever to start up and ran maddeningly slowly when it did. She agreed to my replacing the operating system and so I tested out Chrome OS Flex on it by booting from a USB thumb drive.

The WiFi refused to work and so I installed Lubuntu instead but encountered the same problem. I then tried full-blown Ubuntu and that's what I'm currently using to create this post. I still have no WiFi but managed to access the Internet via a USB C hub into which I've run an Ethernet cable. There is no sound whatever. The keyboard of this laptop has long ceased to be functional because of several dead keys. I'm using a Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse that work off a USB dongle.

The laptop was originally purchased because it can be converted into a (very heavy) tablet and has a touch screen. My granddaughter wanted to use it for digital artwork. From the beginning it was a dog of a machine and then the keyboard gave out. This abomination from HP is certainly the worst device I'm come across and it remains to be seen whether I can ever get it functioning properly again using some other operating system. 

While creating this post, I came across an intriguing workaround for my Mac Book charging problems. It's a USB C to MagSafe 2 converter. See Figure 1.

 

This particular one is rated at 90W whereas my charger is 60W. I haven't been able to find a 60W version of this adapter and I may not need to if my new charger works properly. However, if this charger fails again after a year or so, I may consider this USB C option. Of course, the latest Mac Books all have USB C charging which does away with all this proprietary nonsense.

Update: the charger arrived and it works fine so I'm up and running on my old Mac Book with Chrome OS Flex installed.

Resuscitating Old Laptops

An acquaintance asked me some time ago to resuscitate an old laptop that had ceased to function. It had been running Windows. The laptop, an Asus X401U, dates back to about 2012 when it was being sold for US$280 as a cheap netbook. It has a Celeron processor running at 1GHz with 2GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive. The graphics are integrated Radeon and eat into the already meagre memory. Most versions of this laptop came with 4GB of RAM but not this particular model. See Figure 1.

Figure 1: Asus X401U

I used a program called Rufus to create a bootable USB for installing Windows. This is a fast and powerful little program. I had managed to download the ISO for a stripped-down 32-bit version of Windows 10 that was suitable for the laptop's weak specifications. Despite many attempts I could not succeed in installing Windows. See Figure 2.

Figure 2

I then downloaded the ISO of lubuntu, a lightweight version of the fully-featured Ubuntu, and used Rufus to create a bootable USB. This installed without any problems and the laptop is at last useable again. It still takes over two minutes to boot to the startup screen but once up and running it performs satisfactorily. It's only useful for Internet browsing and simple word processing but that's often enough for many users. See Figure 3.

Figure 3

The lesson to be learned from all this is that these older laptops are ill-suited to run Windows but can be made quite serviceable by installing a lightweight Linux OS like lubuntu via a simple tool like Rufus. Once the ISO for the OS has been downloaded, Rufus will quickly create a bootable USB from which the OS can be run even without installation to the laptop's hard drive. This is useful for trialing the new OS and, if satisfied, it can then be installed on the hard drive.