Ubuntu Linux Laptop Save

This one is not for the un-nerds. It's not really for the true nerds either. It's somewhere in between.

Like a lot of people, I had a laptop that was getting to the end of its useful life. All the normal signs were there. It took in the neighborhood of 7 hours to properly start up. The battery lasted just long enough to unplug the computer and move it from one room to another. Where once I would have stabbed someone in the heart for approaching the machine with a beverage in hand, I now used the open keyboard as a coaster, a tiny individual glass on each of the keys. Yes, I designed a set of glassware for the express purpose of demonstrating how much I disliked the machine. Like you've never wasted a couple bucks.

My laptop was one of the first models to come with Windows Vista. Windows Shitsta. It was crap, and worse, the laptop was clearly not meant to handle the strain. It was built for XP or the like, and Vista was crammed in there. The little progress ring, that blue circle that says, Take a seat. This'll be a while, even that blue ring was too graphical for my computer.

I decided, after getting a new laptop to change the operating system. I don't need all the graphics, all the animations and whatnot. Just something that functions.

I started off looking for a Windows XP installation disc from my desktop. No dice.

Then it was Linux, Ubuntu 11.04.

The installation was a bit of a process. You had to make an installation disc, then change the boot order of your computer.

For the un-nerds who got this far, that means changing your computer's settings so that it looks to the CD-ROM drive for instructions on how to start up.

But, overall, not bad. It took a little while to reinstall, but I was pretty happy with the speed. Plus the narwahl, which is a dolphin with a corkscrewn dildo jammed on its head, was easily removed from the background.

Why are we obsessed with unicorns when a narwahl is a real thing? It's pretty much the unicorn of the sea. Why is a horse horn better than a fish horn?

Anyway, things were going great until I discovered that I was no longer able to connect to wireless. At all. Not just a particular network. Ubuntu didn't even acknowledge that the laptop had the hardware to connect.

Down the digital rabbit hole.

After some quick googling of Ubuntu + [my laptop model] I discovered a bunch of articles along the lines of "Why isn't my wireless working?" "How the fuck come my wireless isn't working?" and "Why in the hell shit ass isn't my wireless working, bitch!?!?"

Again, their words, not mine.

The fix wouldn't be too bad if you could connect to a landline. Which I couldn't. So, the trick was to rip out a driver, replace it with another one, and do the entire thing wirelessly.

I'm not going to bother you with the whole process, but let's just put it this way: It involved using a command prompt, a cutter, an installer, and checking the architecture, whatever the fuck that means.

For me, it meant following hard-earned step-by-step instructions to a T, and then it worked.

Until the computer connected to the internet, installed updates, and then I had to do the whole thing over again.

I'm not a computer genius, clearly. But I have to say, for all its expense and annoyance, Windows still works pretty well for me. I'm not claiming that things are not possible on Ubuntu, but I will claim that for me, and for anyone without a pretty good amount of computer experience, it's going to take you twice as long.

In other words, it's a good idea if you're looking for a hobby. But if your hobby is playing King's Quest and you have to work for hours to get a laptop back in shape to play a game that originally came on floppy disc, it's a lot of work for nothing.