Resurrecting my old laptop

My old LG (LM50a) laptop has been completely out of commission for a few months.  It took a few hits and in the end the CD drive was slipping out of place (and pushing it in caused the computer to crash) and the power connection was shaky – so the computer was losing power and shutting down (battery is long dead).

I wanted to take it to someone to fix so I can resurrect it as an Ubuntu machine. A few days ago I decided to give it a shot myself. I started by unscrewing the visible screws but quickly hit a wall – so before resorting to violence I did a search and found some tips on how to open the casing. I was elated when I had the computer open AND was able to locate the problem.

As I was staring at it I realized that I needed some kind of map to find my way back to a working computer – so I arranged all the screws in reverse chronological order and that worked out just fine.

The power connector was almost free – the soldering was completely gone. So I borrowed a soldering iron from a neighbor and fixed them.

Then started the journey back: (1) replacing the top cover (and connecting the touch-pad); (2) reconnecting & assembling the screen; (3) reconnecting and replacing the power/controls panel; and (4) finally the keyboard.

Then, with my fingers crossed, I plugged the power in and … it came back on and there I was back with my XP installation.

Next up was a lot of uninstalling, deleting/backing up old files and then defragmenting the drive to prepare it for the Ubuntu installation.

Then came Wubi (Windows Ubuntu Installer), another spectacular example of open-source initiative. It works amazing well and simple – you download an installer from their website and select your preferred language, user interface (I went with Kubuntu in English) – and it does EVERYTHING for you – it partitions the hard drive and installs Ubuntu.When it’s done and you reboot the computer you will be able to choose  between Windows XP & Kubuntu.

The download and installation can take some time – so I left it running and missed most of the show. In the morning I found the computer restarted in XP (which remains the default boot operating system) – so I restarted it and… got a messed up graphic display – in which I could make out a progressing progress bar (looked like it was continuing the installation) and I let it continue its work.

When it was finished, another restart and … YEAH!! it worked. My laptop has been resurrected and is now running Kubuntu.

I still need to figure out how I will be using and synchronizing it with my main PC and stuff on my Ubuntu storage server  … but hey – I’ve got my laptop back 🙂

Some more useful links I found as I was searching around and considering my options:

• Installing a dual-boot with Windows without partitioning (with WUBI)
• How to install Ubuntu Linux from USB stick (in case you don’t have a CD drive)
• Firewall GUI (Linux Kernel has built in firewall core capabilities, don’t know yet if I need to mess with them, but this may be useful).
• Avast has a LINUX Hme edition (free) antivirus (not really needed on Linux, but may come in handy when you get/pass stuff to and from Windows and other operating systems, to install download the DEB file package and then, when it’s on your computer, right-click and choose installation option