Hello my friends, I hope you are having a great start to yet another week!
Many out there in the writing community are truly starving artists. I say that because they feel like they must have a state of the art computer and all the great software to accommodate their writing.
I don’t like excuses.
If you want to do something badly enough, you will find a way.
Tonight I wanted to tell you about what you can do with an older laptop that still functions, but just possibly, it is Windows 7 and does not have the spiz to go to Windows 10.
I recently took my laptop and cloned the hard drive to a new SSD drive. My trusted HP with an I3 processor was destined for the shelf when it occurred to me that an SSD drive might breathe some new life into it.
A three-minute boot-up time went to thirty seconds.
Applications that would take forever to launch, now open almost instantaneously.
While it is outside the scope of this blog to go into the different types of SSD drives, the ones I bought are three-layer and a Terabyte for under $100.00 US. ‘Don’t buy used.’ The care and feeding of SSD drives are different from regular drives. For instance, you do not ever run defrag on them.
Today I met an old friend for lunch who had upgraded their laptop. Handing me the old one I was told the operating system was messed up. This too was an I3 HP with 6 gigs of ram.
Ok, I have been dying to play with Ubuntu so…Here is where the story gets good.
Taking the hard drive out and tossing it into the recycle bin after it fell onto the cement once or a dozen times, I replaced it with a new Tera Byte SSD drive.
Downloading Ubuntu for FREE…I burned it onto a DVD ISO file and went to work.
Booting from the DVD, in no time the software was loading away into RAM.
A little history of me.
I was working with computers before the PC was truly a thing. Home computers were unheard of and the Radio Shack TRS 80 was just released for around $5K
Bill Gates was buying DOS for $5,000 from a person in Washington State, and Steve Jobs who I met, was a criminal, making and selling devices in his garage that would defraud the phone company out of revenue from long distance calls.
Fast forward a few years. I do forensic computing and on rare occasions, can be sucked into assisting companies with infrastructure and so on. Truthfully, I want you all to buy my books so I can just write and entertain you…
Ok, that is not the total truth as many of you are already buying my novels. I need one of them to go viral. Tell a friend… 🙂
Ok, enough about me…Why am I going on about Ubuntu?
I am a PC person, I have been with DOS 1.0…. Someone at Microsoft figured out that all of their applications should be intuitive and of course that came with the invention of the WYSIWYG …and, of course, the GUI.
While I think they got the idea from XEROX, who tried to re-coop their entire development cost in the sale of one of their computers, I digress. If memory serves, some college kids came up with the GUI and the mouse, and Bill went and made a deal or something. Not sure how he managed to get the rights to it. Possibly becuase it was open source he just took it. Who knows…
Anyway, Steve and Apple finally came around after his run at NeXT Step. That is how I met him as I supported the NeXT Step computer and OS for years. Steve has always charged too much for his products but, in spite of that they still took off. I think it was the iPhone that was the secret of his success.
Those two giants own the industry until Linux came about. Linux or Ubuntu looks a lot and feels a lot like Apple. Unlike Apple, I have about $100 invested in an old laptop that is very functional with Linux and several free apps. From Libra Office to a French program I just downloaded for writing novels called Plume Creator. For a free program, this thing looks pretty doggone good!
With the SSD drive, I opened the lid and hit enter and it was ready to go.
eBay has older laptops on it all of the time for minimal amounts of dollars. My other HP I3 processor laptop I upgraded to Windows 10. It loads and is ready in thirty seconds.
When this laptop that I am talking about was new, it sold for about $400. Linux based OS with open source apps is a super way for anyone who can’t afford a newer machine and $400 or so for Office to get going.
Yes, you can load Linux on a regular hard drive and still have a functional computer. Why? Invest in an SSD and WOW!
Had I not had experience with Apple, the Linux OS might have been a little challenge but honestly, it looks and acts so much like a MAC it is scary. I, in fact, read that you can run Linux on MACS. I have a MAC desktop I am seriously thinking about putting one of those SSD drives and loading Linux on it. This thing has like 32 gig of Ram and a nice video card. Goodwill and other thrift stores have these things as well. If you can spend less than $100 and get a fast computer for writing and such, why not?
I would love to know about your experience. If you are a Linux user let, us know any hacks you might have found. By ‘us’ I really mean me but, I will share it… 🙂
Much Love -TW
Blog from Author TWScott 