Tag Archive for 'Laptop'

New/Old Laptop: Ubuntu Montage

Published on November 17, 2008 in Personal and linux. 0 Comments

You may remember my old laptop from such posts as this.

Well it broke, so I bought another one!

It even has the original stickers. But.. Its slower than I remember. So I’m trying out different Ubuntu versions to see what boots the fastest. Here are my methodology and results.

Methodology:
The first number is the ammount of seconds from the 0 in the grub countdown till the X in the initial X-server. The second number is the seconds till the firefox screen pops up after I click it while its booting (with auto login enabled.) The reason for this is to account for the total time till my computer is usable. (internet) This is with no performace tweaks, and keeping the default settings. (except enabling auto-login)

Version Time Till X Time till Firefox
Ubuntu 8.10 1:04 2:57
Ubuntu 8.04 1:12 2:53
Ubuntu 7.10 1:15 2:46
Xubuntu 8.10 1:09 2:29
Xubuntu 8.04
Xubuntu 7.10

Yea so I got tired after all those versions. Maybe I’ll come back. So far though I like xfce (I use it on my eeepc (which has numbers of 1:39, 2:05 on xubuntu 8.04….)

Compact Flash Replacement

Published on January 20, 2007 in Laptop and Personal. 2 Comments

My laptop is a Sharp MM20, which I knew I was going to spraypaint eventually, I just needed a reason to. After about a year of wear and scratches from abuse, it was time.

I’m replacing the harddrive in my laptop with a 4GB flash card.
It should be faster:

/dev/sdb:
Timing cached reads: 3532 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1766.79 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 58 MB in 3.10 seconds = 18.69 MB/sec
root@kyle-desktop:~# hdparm -tT /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 3532 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1766.13 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 78 MB in 3.04 seconds = 25.67 MB/sec

Pros: Faster seeks and sustained I/O. Lifetime Warranty.
Cons: Expensive. 25% Disk Space. Bad blocks over time.

So lets do it! I started with instructions from this guy.

First step, disassembling the laptop:
Opened upAntennaDrive
You can see that this is not a normal size laptop hard drive. This is a 1.8″ drive. So I bought this card and a cheap laptop IDE to flash converter off of ebay. (Sorry I don’t have a picture.)

We used containers with numbers and a legend to keep track of small screws and parts. When we were done, these were left over:
Leftovers
(Don’t ask me whats in compartment 8, I really don’t know what it goes to. But there is the leftover drive and screws)

Second step, spray paint it! Oh, and don’t forget to put in the flash card when you put it back together.
Closed1Finished1
Can you spot the laptop?
Woods1Woods2

Of course, with only a 4GB drive, I will be running my favorite operating system of course, Ubuntu!

Screenshot

And the obligatory screen shot!

Want more? Click here to download every picture we took.
Closing thoughts:
I’m extremely impressed. The camo-finish is beautiful and feels great thanks to the clear coat. Nothing broke, and everything went back together correctly thanks to good documentation and pictures for reference. If you have any questions about what I did, post a comment and I’ll come back and answer them.