Laptop is in the shop almost certainly overnight at least. I can’t find the power cable for my old 2010 one. I probably can’t set up my Raspberry Pi, I know I don’t have the right adapter for it because I broke it. I might be able to use someone’s old AlphaSmart?
Laptop still in shop. I should get info tomorrow at least, emails say I’ll be called after 48 hours. I forgot to ask about the AlphaSmart.
Honestly I think the amount of stuff I’ve done and the fact that I have had chunks of happiness over the past several days and not injured myself at all is really suggestive of a lot of mental health improvement. Maybe it’s experiences, maybe it’s having more produce and sardines, but something’s working.
This is still really difficult for me, though.
Update: Apple called this morning to say that I have a hard drive problem (that affects booting from USBs and persists when the drive is wiped, yet doesn’t present any issues when copying files off the drive? seems unlikely) or a motherboard problem. Apple wanted to charge $475 to fix it, which I declined.
I was able to install Xubuntu on it from USB, and it is “working”, in that it still can’t talk to the battery at all and that it seems to freeze sometimes. I’ll probably try to transfer files later today. I am still overall dissatisfied with this state of affairs, though.
I am happy that I have a computer right now, but this does create a bit of a dilemma. I’m not sure I can justify replacing this computer just because I want to play some video games without Linux support and be able to see how charged my battery is. I guess this might get worse in the future, which might also justify replacing it. I sure don’t know how to replace a motherboard myself, and it sounds like a huge pain.
Laptop status update:
- It gets completely nonresponsive and requires a forced shutdown sometimes more than once daily
- Still doesn’t show the battery level (acpi won’t work)
- Sleep/wake issues, does not travel well (overheats in bag)
- Cannot shut down properly
I also still haven’t put my files on this thing. “Mount a 200GB disk image, on an HFS-formatted drive, of an Ext4 partition with logical volume management, and then figure out how to decrypt an encrypted user folder, with the password but without being able to log into it” is something which sounds like it should be technically feasible but also kind of sounds like a nightmare, and I have a feeling that my current computer setup is really not my long-term setup. I can get files from SpiderOak but that will take a while and they won’t be as recent.
What’s going on with the disk image was that booting up my computer in Target Disk Mode and getting the data off of it, using a connected Mac, was such that I couldn’t mount or even really properly interpret a partition with logical volume management, so I just frickin’ copied the whole thing. Yadda yadda I should make more frequent cloud backups or actually figure out how to do regular nice usable backups to a drive or both. At least I have the files. Probably.
I will apparently have some support in repairing or replacing this machine, which biases me towards doing so. Also, I’ll want to use it for taking lecture notes and other time-sensitive outside-the-home uses, so freezing and being a pain to store while asleep are problematic. If I repair it, I’m pretty sure it needs a logic board replacement which I would really rather not do myself. (I don’t have the right screwdrivers, a good workspace, etc.) If I replace it, I should probably replace it with a Windows machine, because the only times I’ve used OSX recently have been gaming and taking the easy route in dealing with printers/scanners.
I don’t know much about shopping for non-Macs or using whatever the latest version of Windows is. Every time I interact with recent proprietary operating systems I do get the vague feeling that they are tending in a direction my computer is not, such that my experience with Windows XP and 2016-and-previous versions of OSX won’t necessarily generalize.
If anyone has advice on any of the above, let me know.
For replacement laptops, eBay is great, especially for people located in the United States. The laptop I am typing this on, which I recently bought from one of the refurbished-laptop stores that sell through eBay, was USD$300 *after* international shipping and import taxes. For an American, it would have been around USD$250.
My usual strategy for laptop buying is “get the best PC USD$300 can buy”. I generally find laptops at that price point strike a good balance between “cheap” and “will keep pace with my needs for the approximately three years it takes for a used laptop to die of old age anyway” ; if you need more from a laptop than I do, you may need a higher budget.
You might not need me to tell you this, but make sure you know what kind of specs you need in a computer (RAM quantity, storage space, number of CPUs, dedicated vs basic graphics, etc), and add a little to leave room to grow. When searching, keep an eye out for laptops that have been discounted because they have problems in areas you don’t care about or are willing to live with: my previous laptop was unusually cheap because it was incapable of standby and took several minutes to come out of hibernation, which was pretty easy to adapt to for someone with my usage pattern.
Since I only just got a Windows 10 machine yesterday, I can’t say much about it. I *can* say that I’m pretty much just keeping that partition around for gaming, and intend to continue using Ubuntu for my primary OS.
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Rather than a dedicated backup drive, I just keep a full copy of my files on my smartphone [link], where they are readily accessible and can in fact–in most cases–be accessed directly from the drive itself. I gather that a lot of people have too much data to pull that method off easily, but even if you can’t do it *yet*, maybe keep it in mind for if/when the progression of smartphones’ increasing storage space catches up to your needs.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #home of the brave #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #(that is a category tag; I actually own four right now) #(it’ll drop to three probably-tonight when I give Dad my old laptop to replace his broken one) #(and I haven’t yet had a chance to sell off my old smartphone but I still plan to) #(morning edit: I think it probably qualifies for this tag too:) #adventures in human capitalism
Brinens and Things 