48 replies to this topic

[daytime dave]

Congrats on an inexpensive laptop Kenny. Glad it is working.

[lyall]

I use to work the computer sales a work. I am a PC tech and the only tech working the sale. I buy only pcs and laptops with out a hard drive. use to get pcs to $10 old CADD pcs, great video cards in them. Pcs with hard drive were $45 - $75. laptops the same $10 with out hard drive and $75 to $100 with hard drive. Yes they are at less five years old. Put Ubuntu on them and the work great. Been using Ubuntu over 6 years now on my pcs and laptops. the kids had to had Windows, but Ubuntu is installed on then to. Just in case I have to work on them to clean them up from all the Windows problems they have.
It is great to have a laptop in the garage, helps a lot with the manuals on it and look things up on the internet

Ubuntu is free to down load and use. If you can not down load it they will ship you a CD or DVD.
You do not had to buy ANT THING. Come to Open Office - almost like Microsoft Office. and a lot more so that you can use it right a way.
if you need or want additional programs - all you have to do is down load them.

KemmyP - I hope you can get that laptop working for you soon
Good luck

[KennyP]

Main programs needed will be for PDF's, photo's, & drawings. I will have to have Windows for some things. How hard is it to set up for the dual system? Does Unbunto set the partition, or how is that done? Can you switch from one to the other easily?

[Trav1s]

I have played with Mint 8 & 9, Ubuntu since 6.06 and Puppylinux. Mint is nice, Puppy is small and light (loads entirely into 512 megs of ram) and works great on old systems but I still come back to Ubuntu.

My suggetion: a dual boot set-up using Wubi for ubuntu. It creates a virtual partition within Windoze (if there is free space on the windoze partition) and can be uninstalled like any other windoze application. It sets up an option to boot into windoze or Ubuntu. There are some downsides to it but for a beginner it is a safer way to play around with it.

http://www.ubuntu.co...ndows-installer

There are graphics, PDF and other free apps for Linux that pretty much do all that a windoze machine can do.

Edited by Trav1s, October 31, 2011 - 09:05 AM.
Added link

[HDWildBill]

Main programs needed will be for PDF's, photo's, & drawings. I will have to have Windows for some things. How hard is it to set up for the dual system? Does Unbunto set the partition, or how is that done? Can you switch from one to the other easily?

Kenny, Yes Linux will install right along side Windows. Windows has to be installed first then your flavor of Linux. You have the option in telling Linux how much space you want to allocate to the installation. After Linux is installed you will then have a boot manager that will let you select which one you want to boot into.

Running Ubuntu in virtual mode with only 512 MB I would think would really be a bit much but try it and see. Like Travis said you can run everything you pointed out in your post in Linux plus all the programs are free. When you install a Linux distro everything you need to do basic computing is usually already installed. You can browse the internet, have a full office suite, read PDF & create them, Play music & Video's (you may need to download the MS codec's they are in the repository), do finances and the list goes on. There are something like 4000 applications in the repositories you can dl for free.

I would suggest before you do anything you go to Distrowatch.com look at the different flavors of Linux then dl their live image and burn it to a cd or dvd and then run it live on the system to see which one you like and runs the best on your system.

Hope this helps.

[KennyP]

I'm not sure if DeltaCad 7 will run in there. I draw a lot of things on it. Plus I use Sketchup.
When you say 'space', what are you talking? Hard drive space or % of total?

[Trav1s]

Does said laptops take ddr or ddr2?

Found this http://h10025.www1.h...&product=500244

It takes DDR and you will pay dearly for it.

Edited by Trav1s, October 31, 2011 - 07:05 PM.

[KennyP]

Don't know yet. Got a Sony Vaio apart and don't want to mix parts.

[HDWildBill]

I'm not sure if DeltaCad 7 will run in there. I draw a lot of things on it. Plus I use Sketchup.
When you say 'space', what are you talking? Hard drive space or % of total?

Hard drive space. Even though Windows may have the whole hard drive, when you install Linux it will detect Windows and then ask you how much do you want to take away from it and it will re-partition and format that amount. By the way the formatting Linux uses if far better then NTFS, no defragging and faster.

There are 10 cad programs in the repository, but I really can't say if they are as good as Deltacad or not. One of these days I need to sit down and learn how to use them. :rolleyes:

I checked the Wine AppDB and DeltaCad had a rating of Silver which means it works but some minor features either don't work or aren't up to par. According to the write up the macros don't work. Sketchup has a rating of Gold on earlier versions of Wine. Which mean that if you install Ubuntu it will automatically install the latest stable released version which should work for your needs (I think! ) You can install Sketchup through Winetricks which will be on your start menu. I can walk you through it once you get that far.

Kenny my suggestion would be that once you get your power supply problem worked out dl a copy of Ubuntu or any other distro play with it and see how you like it. If you do like it but still need Windows then you have the recovery disc install Windows then install Linux along side it.

HTH

[KennyP]

Just wanted to let you know the power supply is fixed. I am on the laptop now.

[HDWildBill]

Great! What was wrong with it?

[KennyP]

The jack for AC power was broken. Got a new one installed for $40, had to take the system board out myself. I cleaned a bunch of stuff out, ran Advanced System Care, now defragging with Smart Defrag 2. Found 40000+ fragmented files. May take a while for that to run. Battery is fully charged. Took the memory from the Sony, 1GB. I'll have to re do the wireless, it won't connect to my router. Need to get rid of all the other connections it has. Just playing with it, cleaning things out. May not have to restore.

[Trav1s]

Run CCleaner on it too. I am guessing the registry needs cleaned up and CCleaner will do it well and for free.

[KennyP]

Advanced System Care does the registry, privacy, junk files, and about 6 other scans. It will do a disk scan for errors and defrag, too.

I will go ahead and restore it. I can't get some programs removed. It seems it is treating me as a guest and not administrator.

Edited by KennyP, November 02, 2011 - 05:17 AM.

[HDWildBill]

Kenny, at the computer boots and displays the bios info but before the windows log appears hit F8 and hold it until it beeps. You will be given several options one being safe mode. Highlight that and then hit enter. It will get to a logon screen which will ask you if you want to logon as administrator choose it and you should be able to do anything you need to.