My mother-in-law (is so fat…I kid,she isn’t, and she’s a nice lady) was getting rather fed up with her other half’s desktop absolutely crawling.
I mean it was unusable, so bloated that it took 5 or 6 minutes just to load up and an eternity to do anything meaningful. I did my best when up there to clean it up but sure enough next time it was as bad as ever.
Anyhow, she was fed up with this and he is reluctant to switch to anything new. So she was going to spend £250-300 of her own money on a new laptop and asked for my advice.
Finding out that all she really did was email, browsing and light games I told her to hang on for bit. I then dug out an old Ubuntu laptop from the attic, 8-9 years old that had a flickering screen, bust power supply, missing HD and knackered battery. apart from that it was fine.
I’m no expert but I thought I’d have a pop at fixing it. So I tracked down the screen issue to a frayed wire, got a new power supply (£5) new battery (£6) OEM copy of XP ((£22) and scavenged the HD back from it’s new home (as portable drive)
Formatted the drive and popped it in. Connected up the battery and power, fixed the frayed screen wiring loom an turned it on…bingo!
I then installed XP with the absolute minimum possible, sourced a few missing drivers and…bob’s your uncle!
Windows has activated OK (so it was genuine) I’ve put security essentials on there, VLC, Kingsoft office suite, Teamviewer (so I can remotely access it) and Chrome together with a new Gmail account.
Anyway, the point of all this self congratulation is to share the following observations.
Yay me
Generic Chinese parts for laptops from ebay are cheap and seem to do the job (the battery is even better than the original)
XP is really quite fast on a minimum install (25 sec boot to desktop, 13 sec shutdown) Ubuntu is even better but that would be a step too far for her.
Free is good, VLC and Kingsoft are absolutely fine for the average mother-in-law
£33 and some fun tinkering time is a bargain for,what is now, quite a speedy and slick 15" laptop.
Yay me again.
I reckon that this machine (that I’m tapping on as we speak) has 95% of the capabilities that most of us need. I’d be happy for this to be my personal machine.
I’m going to round up my bill for my MIL to £40, a man’s got to eat.
I hate throwing away old stuff that works fine, or can work fine with some cheap repairs. I have a 2001 iMac G3 PowerPC 450 MHz ‘Indigo’. Not very capable compared to modern machines, but I dig the style. I upgraded the OS as far as the G3 processor could handle, and put in a WiFi card. With a MacAlly keyboard and mouse, it’s ready to browse. And it’s saved my bacon at least twice when I had a problem with my PowerBook G4. I installed Remote Desktop Connection on the iMac, and I was able to telecommute to work. Actually, considering how slow the office server is, the iMac is fast enough.
Then there’s the PowerBook G4. It became obvious to me that I could no longer continue with it, since programs I wanted to install were not supported by the G4 system and needed the Intel chip. So I replaced it with a MacBook Pro. The PowerBook G4 would be my ‘stunt computer’; i.e., one I use for traveling and such. (It also has RDC, so it can serve as a backup to the new computer.) Unfortunately, the hard drive failed at the outset of my last trip. A week without Internet! :eek: (I’d thought about taking my iPod, but needed the computer to charge it; so why take the iPod? I’d forgotten I had a power supply for the iPod. :smack: ) I bought a new hard drive and had most of its contents copied from the old one, and now I have a perfectly good spare laptop computer.
One of these days I’m going to pull out my old 1997 166 MHz PC laptop and hook up a keyboard, mouse, and monitor to it so I can play Blood and Redneck Rampage.
Here in Las Vegas there is a chain of stores called Laptop Exchange. Essentially it is a laptop repair shop, but you can also sell your laptop there, or buy an used laptop.
Very hit-and-miss, as it depends on who has sold what regarding their inventory - but it is a great place to buy an old laptop for someone like your MIL or somebody who doesn’t necessarily need the newest laptop with all the bells and whistles. Laptops start at about $100 and go up from there. With every purchase, they do give a small warranty (about 3 months?), so considering the cheap price, not a bad place to go for a quick, cheap, used laptop computer.
Perhaps you should start such a business in your area if there isn’t already one nearby?
Speaking of Vegas, I awoke in that town with my netbook on the ground with a shattered screen. I noticed a refurbed version of the same computer at Newegg for about 60% of the original price, so I bought it. Altlthough it ostensibly had a clean Windows 7 install, it was sluggish from the get go. I thought maybe the refurbed machine had a virus or something because it was so damn slow.
Out of curiosity, I checked out LCD screen replacements and saw one for $65, so I bought one… In the mean while, I ran PC-decrapifier and upgraded the memory on the sluggish one and now it runs reasonably quick.
In the meanwhile, I found a screen replacement video for this particular netbook and replaced the screen, Now I have two perfectly functional Aspire One netbooks.
Probably should have looked into screen replacements from day one, but at least I know screen replacements are not necessarily that difficult.
