melannen: Commander Valentine of Alpha Squad Seven, a red-haired female Nick Fury in space, smoking contemplatively (Default)
melannen ([personal profile] melannen) wrote2009-05-31 10:51 pm

tekeli-li

So, uh... Hi all! My laptop is broked. (I would say "b0rked", but that implies something far more sophisticated. And "broken" implies something far less stupid.)

This is not a disaster - for those of you who only found me since Dreamwidth, I break my laptop on a fairly regular basis; in the ~3 years I've had this one, it's had a switch break off the chassis, started to rattle ominously when shaken, needed an entire reformat and reinstall after a virus infection, had the lcd screen start to just sort of wander around inside the case, needed three power cord repairs, then a new power cord and a new battery, and then had the entire power socket break out of the chassis and need to be disassembled and pulled free.

On the upside, it reminds me to back up my data! ^_^ So nothing is lost, and I know exactly what's wrong - the much-battered socket has had a wire break, and I just need to either solder the wire back on, or replace it with a socket cannibalized from another laptop - alas, it broke off right at the socket, so it is beyond the help of tape and splicing. (Unless I want to go the "whack it with a hammer and then tape the wires it directly to the plug" route. Which is what I was doing from the other end before I got my new power cord.) And the computer itself is perfectly fine - I just don't have any way to recharge it once this last battery charge dies. And [livejournal.com profile] ibowieh3, the person I usually exploit for hardware assistance and solder, left on a weeklong business trip yesterday.

For now, I'm on the backup computer, which is the eight-year-old desktop with three hard drives and two OSs, neither of which boot so I'm running it on a Puppy Linux livecd, which works fine for most stuff. But it's too damn slow to do much graphics stuff (and I never quite got my scanner and tablet working with it), and considering I'm doing finishing on a three-day-a-week webcomic, this is probably not sustainable. What I'm probably going to do is bite the bullet and finally install Ubuntu on the hard drive that's currently got a kernel panicky Red Hat 7, since I've heard Ubuntu is a) easy and b) good at memory management. (For the record, this is what happened the last time I tried to install Linux.) Best case, it's all up and running better than ever. ...worst case, it's back to the livecd and I have a newly-formatted empty hard drive.

Well, I mean, worst case is I catch the computer on fire, but that's probably not a *very* high chance.
rivenwanderer: (Default)

[personal profile] rivenwanderer 2009-06-01 03:35 am (UTC)(link)
*ears perk up* Did somebody say webcomics?
rivenwanderer: My purple hair (purplehair)

[personal profile] rivenwanderer 2009-06-01 03:47 am (UTC)(link)
Maybe more usefully: I'm very happy with Ubuntu on both my home laptop and my work desktop. And on my old laptop from college (the one I ended up giving to my mom), the Ubuntu partition aged so much more gracefully than the Windows partition, it was kind of hilarious. So yay Ubuntu! I hope your install goes well and you find it useful for you :)