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OK, OK, I’d rather work than hack….

So, I pussed out and deleted Puppy Linux from the “System Tray of life.”

I had this great idea to get an old IBM ThinkPad laptop, remove the hard drives, install an internal USB drive running Puppy, and write my new book on it. Was also approved by Make Magazine to write an article on this process. Sadly, the article will not be written. Here’s why….

Here’s me inside the old ThinkPad:

ThinkPads are well made, and are easy to take apart. The manual tells you how. They’re made for scientists, not grandmas. Want proof? Here’s a 2004 NASA photo from Wikipedia of a cosmonaut with “Several ThinkPads in use aboard the International Space Station”:

The one he’s using is the exact one I bought for 200 bucks on eBay.

It was all going well until I spilled hot solder on the motherboard and ruined it. I threw the 200 laptop in the trash, and immediately drove to Circuit City and bought a brand new HP Pavilion with 4 gigs of RAM running (gasp) Windows Vista.

Vista had a LOT of problems at first rollout, but the big update pack (which is already in my version) fixed most of it, including providing drivers that weren’t there in the first rollout. That’s how Microsoft does things. They sell you a shiny new broken car, then fix it later for free (while you’re trying to drive it).

The very young, slightly rude salespeople at Circuit City, who were probably selling shoes last month, kept trying to upsell me, hard. They could not understand that someone would rather have a less expensive model with a nice keyboard click than a fancier model with an output for high-def TV monitor. I finally told the kid, “I’m going to buy a laptop within the next half hour. I know exactly what I’m looking for. I do not need your help, and I know far more about computers than you. I’ll come find you when I’m ready, so you can ring it up and get your commission. He said “We don’t get commission any more” and walked away. (I forgot, they fired all the knowlegable sales people nationwide to save money, and hired people off the street at minimum wage, and replaced commissions with quotas.)

I hated Vista before, and it still doesn’t run all my programs (I still have them running on my other laptop, which is running XP, and is set up to a monitor). I know I said I’d never use Vista. But if you turn off all the flashy bullshit that Vista has to try to make it look like a Mac, it runs screamingly fast. (Here’s a great tutorial on doing that.) Because the hardware needed to run Vista with all that stuff is powerful. So if you turn it all off, it’s great. I also like that Vista has true sleep mode, which is great for the way I write. I often write in bursts of 15-20 minutes, get up and do something else, then come back, write five minutes, get up, come back, write an hour, etc. Sleep mode enables me to have long battery life while doing that all over the house (or outside, when weather gets nicer.)

I also set it up to look like Win 98, which is easier, and uses less memory. (Right click on Start, go to Properties/Classic Start Menu.)

I love that everything is one click, not two, in Vista. I think they’re even imitating Linux with that, but I’ve always wondered, “Why two clicks? it’s a waste of my energy, it adds up, and it hurts my hands with my 2 million clicks a year.” (By the way, MouseCount runs well on Vista.)

Computer was only $750. Damn computers are getting better and faster and cheaper. I skipped getting the three-year extended warranty (for $350 bucks), partly because I replace my computers about every year, and partially because in this economy, Circuit City is likely to be out of business in three years.

I really do have the new laptop set up only to write my next book, which I plan being a bestseller. Did set it up for the Internet, but only to search web for research, and to FTP backups to a hidden folder on a website. Only other program I put on it is Microsoft Word 2003 (the best version of it. It reached perfection at that point, and never got better.

Also, one thing that would have made writing my book on Puppy Linux harder was the fact that the word processor, AbiWord, has a bug that makes the “find” function crash, and then you have to re-open the program. I use “find” constantly in my writing, due to the way I write. I sort of just start writing ideas, then go back and move them around and expand on them. I have to be able to find certain ideas, based on words in them, quickly in order to do that.

I did bring one thing over from Puppy Linux, and some Linux people may consider putting this on a Vista box as heresy, but I love the Puppy desktop art so much, I brought it over.

So - here’s my streamlined “write-one-best-seller-only” desktop, with only four icons:

I still think Puppy Linux is a great thing, but I need the right tools for the job.

Here’s an unrelated but nifty photo of our cats. It’s rare that Charlie (the middle one) puts up with the squittens being this close to her, so I had to document it for the ages:

This entry was posted by Michael W. Dean on Saturday, January 10th, 2009 at 2:44 pm and is filed under Gear porn, MWD's Cool Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.