In the last newsletter I left you with the cliff-hanger ending of another resurrection. No, it is not Easter yet; instead, it was an “all in one” computer that I was given as a “basket case” project. The hard drive was missing, as it had been destroyed by a family member who got so frustrated with the machine that they had prepared it for the landfill. Well, on a Sunday, a church member asked if there was any hope for this machine, as I had previously given a lecture and demonstration of the Linux operating system at the local library a few weeks previous to the end of Windows 10 this past October. “Can it be functional again?”, she asked. I said that I would give it a try, especially since I had an old mechanical hard drive at home from my computer that I had updated to the more modern solid-state drive to make it run faster. Perhaps it would work; moreover, I would be putting the Linux operating system on it, as this old machine would never qualify for the Windows 11 update.
I brought the “basket case” computer home for inspection, and it was a case of bad news and good news. Indeed, the hard drive was in pieces in a separate bag, and this machine was an Acer from 2018, so I was correct in my guess that Windows 11 was out of the question. The good news was that it looked like my old hard drive from a 2014 Lenovo laptop would fit. I usually put the “Linux Mint” version of Linux on these “resurrected” computers, but for some reason this Acer was not as cooperative in functioning with it. Previously, my experience has shown that the brands “Lenovo” and “Dell” work extremely well with this version, but Acer was a bit more problematic. So, I tried to put the Linux version, “Ubuntu” on it instead. Ubuntu is the most polished version of the Linux family of systems. Voila! It booted up and everything worked perfectly. Perhaps Ubuntu had better compatibility with some of this computer’s hardware. Thus, another computer was saved from the landfill! I will admit, that it is no speed demon with the old-style hard drive, but it is functionable for everything except gaming. I could update the RAM from 12 gb to its maximum of 16 gb, but without the additional cost of a solid-state drive, it was hardly necessary. Besides, I recycled that old hard drive too.
In the end, I was at church the next week and mentioned the successful “resurrection”, but I was disappointed to hear that in the interim she had needlessly gone to a “big box” electronics store and purchased a new computer. Yes, with Windows 11. I admit that I was somewhat crestfallen, for in saving one machine from oblivion, the manufacturers and retailers had succeeded in producing and selling another. The cycle of foolishness continues, despite efforts to be good stewards of the earth’s resources with which God blessed us. But now she has a backup when her new machine becomes supposedly obsolete in the near future. Perhaps when Windows 12 comes out, I shall have another “resurrection” project.
Yours truly,
Martin Dawson, the “Linux evangelist”
(Retired and living in Cornwall PEI)