This past week, I was hanging out with a good friend of mine who has an old IBM Thinkpad®, much like the one pictured below. The laptop has seen better days — the keyboard was recently replaced after apple juice was spilled on it, and ultimately he had to bargain with some Russian friends to replace the RAM and try to reformat the hard drive because it caught some kind of virus (he thinks Conficker, but who really knows?). The whole thing was a little sketchy, and eventually it stopped working completely. This isn’t my friend’s only computer; it was his jukebox web surfer. Because of this, he didn’t want to spend a lot of time or money fixing it, and was considering getting rid of it. The one thing holding him back was the money he had just spent replacing the keyboard.
Now in this situation, with an old rundown laptop, there are a few options to consider: You can trash the laptop (not advisable), or recycle it at Green Citizen or Best Buy. You can take the laptop apart to learn about computers or to switch the components to another machine. You could also give it away to some young “whipper-snapper” (or sibling) to experiment with. Your final alternative might actually be your best: To reuse the laptop for FREE with minimal effort, and have it run faster and better than it did brand new. It’s not that hard to do!
News flash: While so many computer users are fighting about whether PCs are better than Macs or vice-versa, a whole camp of elite smarty-pants kids are making their own operating system called Linux. Did I mention it’s free, comes pre-installed with OpenOffice (a free version of Microsoft® Excel, Word, and PowerPoint tools put out by Sun® and Oracle® and supported by IBM) and runs A LOT faster than either Mac OSX or XP/Vista? See the fun skits below for more on this.
So how does one approach Linux? First, you pick a version or distribution (just like Windows has XP and Vista, Linux has Red Hat, Ubuntu, etc.) I like Ubuntu. Then go to the official website or google the Linux version to find its website. Download the most recent ISO image and burn it to a CD. Then restart your laptop (or desktop) and initiate the disk. This is the part that most people don’t know about.
To initiate the disk, you have to hit one of your F keys (usually F12, F7, or F5) to bring up the boot menu. You are now communicating with your computer’s BIOS. The BIOS (basic input-output system) is an underlying operating system which viruses and hard drives depend on — it never goes away and you can always access it to change your computer, even if your hard drive is broken or corrupt (the BIOS is what thieves use when they reformat stolen laptops). On my friend’s IBM I had to hit the purple IBM button, which I learned by watching his screen when I rebooted the computer. Usually there are settings that flash by with instructions on how to initiate the BIOS during the black boot sequence. Alternately, you can google your computer make/model and figure it out.
Once the BIOS is initiated, choose the boot order and set it up to boot from your CD drive (where the Linux ISO is) and voila! You will be walked through the steps to install a completely new OS on your computer. (Note: This will delete everything on your hard drive, but if you have a virus or a messed-up computer, you have probably already lost everything already, so no worries!)
By using Ubuntu or other versions of Linux, you can take an old “worthless-piece-of-crap” laptop and turn it into something quite fast and capable. Best of all, it’s free! In most cases, the computer will work even better than new, because Linux doesn’t install extra junk or promotional services — it’s bare-bones, but very powerful and effective. This is really the best kind of recycling, and you’ll be learning as you go.
Even if you don’t need your old laptop, installing Linux and passing it off to a friend is a great way to keep the computer alive and useful instead of turning it into polluting junk. As an added bonus, when you do this it reformats your hard drive so that privacy isn’t an issue.
If you need help installing Ubuntu, just post your questions below. It does take a bit of finessing, but is very satisfying once it works, and it WILL work. Linux can run on any computer or laptop.
Again, just to be clear, below are the steps. You can also try Linux before installing it by running it directly off of a CD (in a working Windows environment) or on a memory stick.
- Choose a version of Linux (see chart).
- Burn it to a CD (using a working computer).
- Put the CD in your old or broken computer and restart or boot.
- As the computer is booting, hit F12 (or the appropriate F key) to enter your BIOS.
- Figure out how to change the boot order, set the CD as first to boot, and remove the other boot devices if possible.
- Let the computer restart and initiate a boot from the CD – this may be automatic or require hitting the F12 or other F key.
- Follow the on-screen instructions, reformat your hard drive, and install Linux.
- Once Linux is installed, go back into your BIOS and restore the old boot order, then boot from the hard drive (HD), otherwise when you take the CD out of the computer, it won’t know where to go to boot up and you’ll an error message such as “no operating system” when you restart (which tends to freak people out).
