Linux Computers

[RJ]

Ok I switched back to the e6530; quad CPU beats the 9 year old chip that Acer put in their boxes...It was either that or I slit my wrists.

...and here we are.

Just before a family visit this weekend, my old Dell e6530 started shutting off randomly, reporting thermal issues (even when cold). This, plus the fact that the final output to the HDMI stopped working was kinda the last straw. So my house guests are gone, and I spent a good bit of time practising those rusty restore skills.

Fortunately, I'd recently instituted a daily backup on power up of all my data onto a Seagate 2T portable USB disk drive. So all I had to do was move the drive over to my Acer A0722 laptop, fire up Linux, and install Luckybackup. Then add four tasks under the default profile to RESTORE each directory. Actually it turned out the biggest wait of about 6 hours was "Videos", all of the other directories I'd populated when I installed Linux on the Acer, so they were only incremental. Lesson learned: make daily backups.

As to the performance of the Acer, a dual CPU box is definitely not as snappy as a quad CPU. But at least I have my big 32" screen back, and it works. Plus the Acer is much much quieter, and I don't have a cooling fan running under the CPU, either.

Perhaps after we move house this spring I can agitate for a new laptop. Or at least a newer laptop lol.

[Chance]

I grew envious of the size and weight of my old MacBook Air that I gave to my wife to use. The only other laptops I had were more boat anchor than computer, so I picked up one of these after hearing people rave about the company.



Haven't spent enough time with it to give a full review, but the initial impressions are excellent. Their customer service is great: had an issue submitting a support ticket on their website, so I called their office in Denver, immediately connected to a real human with whom I had an unscripted human conversation, then promptly received an e-mail with links to everything we discussed.

I am hopeful my good experiences will continue.

[jh9]

I grew envious of the size and weight of my old MacBook Air that I gave to my wife to use. The only other laptops I had were more boat anchor than computer, so I picked up one of these after hearing people rave about the company.



Haven't spent enough time with it to give a full review, but the initial impressions are excellent. Their customer service is great: had an issue submitting a support ticket on their website, so I called their office in Denver, immediately connected to a real human with whom I had an unscripted human conversation, then promptly received an e-mail with links to everything we discussed.

I am hopeful my good experiences will continue.

You're in for a treat.

Not many hardware manufacturers will give you things like this. Straight up factory how-to guides for tear down, replacement or repair if you want to DIY.

Even for batteries on the slim ultrabook-types that are affixed to the case by adhesives.

[SecondsCount]

I ended up firing up my old Linux Mint box today.

Two weeks ago it was announced that the company I work for was sold. The old company used Gsuite and the new company uses Office 365 with Outlook. They gave me a link with credentials to start using Outlook.

I started it up in Chrome and it would work fine for a couple hours and then things would stop working. I would have to completely reboot my company issued one year old Lenovo laptop, running Win10. 365 wouldn't run at all in Microsoft Edge.

After dealing with this for a couple days I decided I would try it on my 10 year Dell running Mint with Firefox. It ran all day without a glitch. Once in a while there would be a slight delay but never lost any functionality.

[RJ]

...and I'm back to using Linux.

I picked up a couple Gateway SX-2865 desktops for cheap at a yard sale this weekend. Took them home, they looked great. 500Gb SCSI drives, HDMI output, no WiFi though, just wired LAN.

I downloaded the current release of Linux Mint 21 (Cinnamon) to my Windoze box. After validating the *.iso, I created the bootable media by burning it to a 64G USB 3.0 stick using Etcher. I inserted the stick on the Gateway, and booted the kernel off the stick to the install program. Very slick.

After about 5 minutes, it was ready. I brought over my backup 1T USB drive and migrated my current file-set over to the new Gateways. Cool beans.

For boxes that were current in 2013, performance is surprisingly snappy. It's about as fast as my Laptop, a 2018 vintage HP but saddled with Windows, and all the overhead that goes with it. So far, everything works (Firefox, LibreOffice).

I've missed running Linux, it's just a vastly cleaner OS and I can do stuff that you have to stand one one leg to get Windows to do (grep, tar, etc.)