Sunday, January 29, 2017

Post 3483 - Sunday

Nearly 10pm.

Do you watch The Big Bang Theory? There was that episode where Sheldon stayed home from some event so he could do a clean install of his computer's OS on his beloved laptop. The laugh track came on. Ha ha ha. Silly Sheldon.

Well, guess how I spent a few hours today?

I was running a very old flavour of Linux, called Easy Peasy. Went out of long term support in... 2014, I think it was. Never got around to refreshing it. It just worked, and I was happy with the interface. But, increasingly, I could do less and less with it. It was starting to slow down. Updates were impossible.

I had upgraded an old laptop over the weekend, in the Valley. I decided to upgrade this one, today. After an hour or so, I was running Linux Mint, a version that is maybe a year old, but which is long term support until 2020 or something. A by-product of the install was that the wireless stopped working, so I stuck a usb wireless adapter in, and that worked. After a couple of hours, installing the latest updates and bringing my dropbox online on that machine, I installed some broadcom adapters, and then, the internal wireless was working again, so I could discard the usb wireless adapter I had been using for a few hours.

I should have done this upgrade 18 months ago. Shame on me. But it is done now, and I should get another couple years out of that laptop.

I keep wondering, once again, how people who don't have my background cope with it. Do they keep running a feeble old OS on a computer, hoping against hope that it doesn't fall prey to a virus or the hard drive doesn't crash and they lose all their data or something? What do they do, other than hit on geeks like me, I mean?

What follows a three day weekend? A return to reality. First thing tomorrow morning, we are taking the car in to the shop again, to get that Aquapel treatment applied to the new windshield. Means getting up earlier than we'd like to drive in and try to beat traffic. Fun times!

See you tomorrow, my lovelies.

Bevboy

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