Don't Buy a New Laptop, Reuse Your Old One!

This past week I was hanging out with a good friend of mine who has an old IBM Thinkpad laptop, much like the one pictured below. Now the laptop has seen better days, the keyboard was recently replaced after apple juice got 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 got some kind of virus, he thinks conficker but who really knows? The whole thing was a little sketchy, eventually it stopped working completely. The thing is, my friend has a couple of computers and this one was really his juke box web surfer. He didn't want to spend a lot of time or money to fix it, but after replacing the keyboard he didn't want to abandon it either.

Now in this kind of situation there are several options. Trash the laptop (don't do this), recycle it by going to Green Citizen or Best Buy, take the laptop apart to learn about computers, give it away to some young whipper snapper (or sibbling) or... you can reuse the laptop for FREE with minimal effort and have it run faster and better than it did before. You don't believe me? News flash, while all of you normal computer users are out there fighting about how PC's are better than Mac's or visa versa, there is a whole camp of elite smarty pants kids out there making their own sick-ass operating systems using Linux. And did I mention it's free, comes pre-installed with open office (a free version of excel, word, and powerpoint tools put out by Sun and Oracle supported by IBM) and it runs WAY faster than both Mac OSX or XP/Vista? See the fun skits below for more info:

So how does one approach Linux? Well, you pick a version or "distribution" (just like Windows has XP and Vista, Linux has Red Hat, Ubuntu etc.) I like Ubuntu. You go to their official website or google the linux version to find the website. Download the most recent iso and burn it to a CD. Then restart your laptop (or PC) and initiate the disk. This is the hard part that most people don't know about.

To initiate the disk you usually have to hit one of your F keys (F12, F7, F5) to get the boot menu to come up. You are communicating with your computer's "bios" when you do this. The bios is like an underlying operating system that viruses and hard drives and everything else depend on... so it never goes away and you can always call on it to change your computer even if your hard drive is broken or corrupt (this is what thiefs use when they steal laptops to reformat them, they use your bios). So on my friend's IBM I actually had to hit the purple IBM button, I learned this by watching his screen when I restarted the computer, usually there are settings that flash by and instruct you on how to initite the bios during the black boot sequence, you can also google your computer make/model and figure it out.

Once the bios is initiated you choose the boot order and set it up to boot from your CD rom (where the iso for Linux is at) and voila, you are 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 probably already lost everything, 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 awesome, fast, capable, and best of all, free! In most cases the computer will work even better than when it was brand new because Linux doesn't install extra junk or promotional services, it's barebones but also 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 junk poluting the environment and when you do this it reformats your hard drive so privacy isn't an issue. If you need help installing Ubuntu just post your questions below and I'll try to respond, it does take a bit of finnicking but is very satisfying once it works, and it WILL work, Linux can run on virtually any computer or laptop.

Again, just to be clear here 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.

1. Choose a version of Linux See Chart
   
2. Burn it to a CD (using a working computer)
   
3. Put the CD in your old or broken computer and restart or boot it
4. As the computer is booting hit F12 (or some other key) to enter your Bios
5. Figure out how to change the boot order, set CD as first to boot, maybe even remove the other boot devices
   
6. Let the computer restart again and initiate boot from CD, this could be automatic or require F12
7. Follow on screen instructions, reformat your hard drive, install Linux
8. Once Linux is installed go back into your Bios and restore the old boot order, boot from HD, otherwise if you take the CD out the computer won't know where to go to boot up and you'll get some error like "no operating system" when you restart, which tends to freak people out ;)