Over the past few weeks I’ve been bringing an old laptop back to life. It was given to me by my good friend Bill Blohm who had no use for it. I was looking for a fixer-upper that I could put Linux on and use it strictly for writing. I didn’t care how old or ugly it was – which is probably a good thing.
What I would up with was an HP Omnibook 7150 with no HDD, 128MB RAM with no power supply and no modem. The power supply was found at a local battery shop and worked fine. The RAM and a HDD was ordered from a NY web site. One of the RAM upgrade DIMMs was bad. The HDD works fine. But I didn’t know it worked until I found a proprietary holder for it. That took several false starts at mail order houses to finally find on EBay. With enough parts to start installing, I went all the way back to Ubuntu 5.04 to get an OS on the HDD. Then I gradually started upgrading in order with some old install discs I still had laying around.
At bedtime on Friday night, I have a working version of 6.10.
Hi Tim,
Thanks for stopping by. The old lappy is running Ubuntu 7.04 just fine, with internet and I’m deep into the fourth draft of Tyrmia on it.
PS leaving a comment back at your blog now. ;-)
Hi Ken,
I read a post of yours on JAKonrath’s blog, and did what I wish people would do for me – click on my name to see my site (no hints, just saying) and to meet more about up and coming science fiction authors.
Anyway, about this post: good for you fixing up that old computer. I know that would be beyond my abilities. It’s kind of funny that you are looking for an old laptop for writing while I’m looking for a new one, but I can understand wanting a writing device without the distractions. I hope it works well for you and I look forward to seeing more of your writing.
Tim