Putting Ubuntu on my old laptop…
Yay….I actually reformatted my really old laptop (from like 2001 or 2002) and put Ubuntu 8.10 Linux on it. I am now running brand new software on it and it’s so damn fast because I don’t have to use anti-virus software like I did with Windows. I’ve actually got it running as fast as it did back when it was new with Windows ME on it (yes, Windows ME that buggy piece of crap released between 98 and XP, uggghh).  The only problem I’ve noticed is that the shutdown doesn’t work properly on it???? Other than that and the weird partitioning issue (had to make it 2 partitions because of the crappy old bios in it). But I mean hey, to get a Pentium III 800Mhz Laptop with only 256MB of memory and a 10GB hard drive run that damn fast was worth it. [tech note: partitions are sda1 : 7GB, sda5 :2.5GB (mounted at /home), and the rest as sda6/Swap. ] Now if I can get the damn thing running as a media center…. Oh wait, one more weird issue—-it won’t show the battery status. Now that’s an issue. I’ll have to look more into that because using it to take notes might be difficult if I don’t know how much power it has. I guess the Handheld PC is better for that purpose anyway. In any event I now have a computer running that I didn’t have before and it has all the standard crap with a full office suite, which is basically what I had running on it under Windows but the anti-virus software was slowing it down to a crawl and the software on it (especially office) was really old. Oh and it’s nice to hook up a USB flash drive or USB hard drive without it complaining about not being USB 2.0…