I finally got a nice laptop

Well, I finally broke down and did it.  For Amazon's Prime Day this past week, I ordered myself a new laptop.  And this time, it's actually a nice one.

Acer Spin 5 and Lenovo IdeaPad U310 side by side

The old laptop

My previous laptop was a Lenovo IdeaPad U310 that I bought almost 8 years ago.  I know because I looked up the blog entry.  It's actually still in pretty good shape, which is why I haven't replaced it.  It already had decent horsepower (a Core i5, upgraded with 8GB of RAM) and I upgraded it with an SSD about three years ago, so it still performs reasonably well for my purposes.  In fact, my son will be inheriting it so that he has a non-school laptop he can use. 

On the other hand, it is 8 years old.  And while it still works well, it's starting to show its age - the screen hinge is starting to wear out and the WiFi adapter is unreliable.  On top of that, I've been spoiled by having relatively good laptops at work, so I kinda just wanted something nicer.

While the IdeaPad is a solid laptop, it's not particularly fancy.  It's an ultrabook, but a low-end one - I only paid $650 for it in 2013.  It's got decent build quality and a touch screen, but that's about it for amenities.  No keyboard lighting or stylus.  The screen is workable, but not great - the main problem being that it has a very narrow viewing angle.  It's not particularly light (about 3.7 pounds according to Lenovo's specs) and it tends to run a little hot when under any kind of load.

The new laptop

I looked at several of the laptops on Prime Day special, but after going back and forth several times, I eventually decided not to compromise and just spend a little extra money on something nice.  I eventually settled on an Acer Spin 5, which was on sale for $880.  Normally, I'd be too cheap to spend that much, but I figured that as long as I was getting a new laptop, I might as well make it a noticeable upgrade.

Acer Spin 5 with stylus out

And in terms of features, this is a significant upgrade.  Of course, being a new system, the Spin 5 has more horse-power, with 16GB of RAM, a Core i7 processor, and a 500GB NVMe drive.  However, it's the other features that are what make the big difference for me.  For starters, the Spin 5 is a convertible, i.e. it has a 360 degree hinge and can fold into a tablet mode.  (My wife's Dell Inspiron 7000 is also a convertible and I've always thought it looked like a cool capability.)  To complement that, it comes with a nice powered stylus that stows in the body of the laptop.  The keyboard is backlit (which I didn't used to think I cared about, but really does make a difference when you want to work in low light) and the touchpad has an integrated fingerprint reader that you can use to log in with Windows Hello (which is a dumb name, but whatever).

The screen is very nice.  It's a 13.5" IPS display with a 3:2 aspect ratio and very thin borders at the edge.  This actually feels much bigger than the old IdeaPad, even though it has a 13.3" display, but at a 16:9 aspect ratio.  I actually think that this alone may have been worth the price.  The increase in vertical screen space is immediately noticeable and makes the laptop much more pleasant to use, whereas the smaller display on the IdeaPad often felt a little cramped. 

I'm also enjoying the ultra-portable aspect of the Spin.  It's very thin and only weighs about 2.6 pounds.  That makes it very easy to carry around and keeps it from feeling unwieldy in tablet mode.

I've only had it a few days, but so far I don't have many complaints.  I do find the fact that home/end the function key for page-up/down kind of annoying.  Especially when print-screen and pause/break (which I use much less frequently) both have dedicated keys.  I guess I'll get used to it, but it's still dumb.  I also didn't like that, for the top row, F1-F12 are the function keys and the media features are the default.  Luckily, that's easily fixed with a BIOS setting.  One other minor weirdness is that the 3:2 screen means that the system is a slightly weird shape for a laptop.  I mean, it does fit into the bag I use for the IdeaPad, but just barely - it's got plenty of room on the sides, but it's almost too tall to close the bag.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with the Spin 5 so far.  I'm still getting the software set up, so we'll see how it performs with some regular use, but I don't anticipate any problems.  And I'm already using the tablet mode for casual web browsing and finding it just as handy as I'd hoped.  I don't think I'm ever going to be able to go back to a cheap laptop again.

More laptop repair

Following on my previous post, this last weekend I did a little more laptop repair.  I was successful again, but this time it was much easier.

This time my task was to fix up an old laptop for my son.  After a month off, it's time for him to get back to doing some school work.  He functions better when he has a regular schedule and the whole learning-from-home coronavirus pandemic thing really threw him for a loop.  So it will do him good to get back to a little Reflex math and Lexia reading, in addition to doing some writing on the computer.  (He hates writing, but seems to tolerate it better when he can type rather than print.  Plus he likes the "learn to type" program he was using.)

Well, to do that he needs a computer.  He was using the school laptop that he used in the classroom (you know, back when kids were allowed to go into the school - we still don't know for sure if that'll be a possibility for the fall), but we had to return that at the end of the year.  And since neither I nor my wife wanted to sacrifice our laptop to the cause, we decided the easiest solution would be to fix up the old MacBook Pro I had sitting on a shelf.  It's a 2010 model that we hadn't used in several years, but it was still functional.  It also had the benefit of being a retired web development laptop, so it had a decent amount of horsepower.  This may serve us well if he has to do distance-learning from home in the fall, because the school laptop he was issued was hideously slow.  It basically had the memory to run Windows 10, whatever central management software the school had installed on it, and just barely enough left to run one actual user application.  Any more than that and it started thrashing like crazy and ground to a halt.  And don't even think about letting it go more than a day without a reboot.

Anyway, shortly after setting about this task, I realized this laptop would need some hardware work.  There were actually two things wrong.  The first I already knew about: the trackpad was broken.  It tracked finger movement, but it wouldn't click, which made it fairly useless.  You could sort of work with it by turning on the "tap to click" setting, but that was highly limited and painful at best.  However, I figured that problem would be solved with a USB mouse.

The second problem was more immediate.  While creating an account and figuring out what to do software-wise, I realized that the bottom of the Macbook wasn't flat.  In fact, one side of the bottom panel wasn't even flush with the rest of the case.  At first, I figured maybe a screw had come loose, or that I'd opened it up for some reason and put the panel back on crooked.  But no.  It was the battery.

Bulging Macbook battery

That's the battery that I took out of the Macbook.  In case you can't see in the image, it's bulging to the point that the external plastic casing has started to break open.  It was actually putting so much pressure on the case that it was forcing it open.  So that had to be replaced too.

Fortunately, this was a much less involved operation than the Dell repair.  I don't know about the current models, but the 2010 Macbook Pros are built to be pretty easy to service.  No annoying plastic clips or other weird tricks needed to open the case - just take out the screws on the bottom.  I'm sure replacing the keyboard would be more difficult, but the battery and trackpad were pretty easy.  In fact, I was just able to follow the video below.

The only hard part was getting the trackpad out.  That's because one of the screws was hopelessly stuck and I managed to strip the head trying to get it out.  I eventually had to leave that screw in, remove the screws that fixed the support bracket to the case, and bend the bracket to get the trackpad out.  Then, after some struggle, I was able to work the stripped screw out with some pliers and a little WD-40.  I didn't have any other screws of the proper size, so I had to put the stripped screw back in the new trackpad using the pliers, which was a pain, but less difficult than getting it out.

All in all, it was a pretty painless repair.  The next part was just cleaning it up the software on the system.  The first thing was to upgrade OSX.  Since I hadn't used that laptop in years, it was still running Mavericks (OSX version 10.9), so I updated it to High Sierra (version 10.13), which is the newest one that supports the Mid-2010 hardware.  It's still two releases out of date (current is Catalina, v10.15), but it's better than nothing.  

The next step was removing all the old (and in some cases no-longer-working) software and upgrading the things that my son might actually need.  The two big ones were, of course, Chrome and Microsoft Office.  I also set up KeePassXC along with the Chrome plugin and created a password database for him to use.  He might only be seven, but it doesn't hurt to start instilling some basic security awareness.  Last but not least, I got a copy of MSP360 (formerly Cloudberry) Backup for Mac and set that up like the instances on our other laptops, so that he's all backed up.

So for an investment of a few hours time and about $110 in parts and software, my kid has a nice, working laptop.  I walked him through logging in, what applications are available, using KeePassXC, and the other things he needs to know for now.  It'll take a little practice for him to get used to it, since there's a lot there and he's never used a Mac before, but he took to it pretty well.  Hopefully this will be the beginning of a good educational experience for him.

My biggest laptop repair

I am very proud of myself.  Last weekend, I undertook my most extensive laptop repair yet, and it worked!

My task: replace the keyboard in my wife's laptop.  Now, this might not sound difficult, but the problem is that my wife has a Dell Inspiron 13 7359.  It's one of those convertibles where the screen will fold all the way around to turn into a quasi-tablet.  It's actually a fairly nice laptop, and it's got more than enough horsepower for her use.  The problem is that she's kind of tough on it and the keyboard was going bad.  In fact, it had quite a few keys that were either flat-out dead or very hard to press, to the point that the keyboard was basically unusable.  So it needed to be replaced.

The problem is that you can't replace this keyboard from the top.  The top of the case is all one piece and covers the space between the keys.  So you have to do it from the bottom, which means that you need to take literally all the components out of the case.  But it's not even that simple.  You can't just  take everything out and then unscrew the keyboard.  Noooo, that would be too easy.  You need remove a layer of adhesive plastic, which is on top of a protective metal plate which is glued and plastic-welded to the case and keyboard.  Then you can remove the glue that holds the keyboard to the case and replace it.  And, of course, then you've got to put back the plate and all the components.

The good news is that I managed to get through all that without too much difficulty.  I used the YouTube video above as a guide to disassembling the core components.  Then I took the advice from this iFixit thread to use use a soldering iron to melt the plastic welds (and also the glue).  I was able to use the soldering iron to go around the edges of each plastic weld and push the melted plastic to the middle of the post, as in the image below.  I used a small screwdriver to pry up the plate as I removed each weld. The soldering iron also easily melted the glue.  After replacing getting everything out, I was able to snap the new keyboard in over the plastic posts without too much trouble.  I used a little hot glue to hold it, then replaced the metal plate, using the soldering iron to spread the plastic from the welds back over the edge of the metal.  Probably not as good as new, but good enough to hold.  Then it was just a matter of putting back the sheet of adhesive plastic and all the system components.

Inside of the case with some of the plastic welds melted

The only part that I actually had any serious problems with was reconnecting the circuit board that houses the WiFi chip to the the motherboard.  For some reason, I just couldn't get the cable to stay put.  I'm not sure if it was just loose or if I wasn't getting it seated properly.  This was especially annoying because that board is what the power button is connected to, so the system wouldn't even turn on if it came loose, which kept happening in the process of putting the back cover on.  I eventually was able to get it to stay put with some tape, so at least it worked out.

In the process, I also upgraded the laptop hard drive from spinning rust to solid-state.  I used EaseUs Todo Backup Home version to and a USB hard drive enclosure to clone the existing system from the HDD to the SSD and just swapped in the SSD when I was putting the system back together.  It worked out great.  The drive cloning process was fairly painless.  It took around 45 minutes to clone the 500GB drive.  The only annoyance was the progress bar that stayed at 53% for half an hour before jumping to 90% when it was about to finish.  The software seemed fairly nice, but I didn't use it much - I really just needed to clone that one disk.  They have a free version, but sadly it does not seem to include the system cloning feature, so I just used the free trial of the paid version.  This does require you to sign up for a subscription and cancel before the trial ends, which is annoying, but not ultimately a big deal.

So now my wife can actually type on her laptop and it has a faster disk.  Total cost: $115.  That's probably less than I would have paid for just the parts if I'd taken it to a shop (which I don't know if they're even opened now).  The break-down was $20 for the keyboard, $70 for the SSD, $15 for the hard drive enclosure, and $10 for a soldering iron.  Yes, I had to buy a soldering iron.  I'd never actually used one before, believe it or not.  But I used it successfully and only burned myself once.  Not bad for a software guy, if I do say so myself.

More laptop fixups

As I mentioned the other day, I recently acquired a hand-me-down laptop. My sister-in-law bought herself a shiny new Dell and gave me her old Compaq Presario R4000 with the dead battery.

So I'm currently in the process of fixing this system up. So far I've just wiped the drive, laid down a fresh install of Windows XP SP3, and installed the drivers and some standard applications. It's actually not a bad little system - Athlon XP-64 processor, 80GB hard drive, DVD burner. Hardly state of the art, but it beats the pants off my old Dell Inspiron B120.

Aside from the battery (which is gonna cost me about $75 to replace), there's only one problem: memory. The system comes with 512MB of RAM, which was fine for the time, but is a little small now. The problem is that the system has two 256MB RAM modules - one of which is under the keyboard, which is really annoying. And they're not especcially cheap modules, either - it takes DDR PC2700 sticks, which go for about $40 per gig on NewEgg. By way of contrast, I recently got another 1GB stick of DDR2 PC5300 to max out the RAM on my Dell, and it only cost me $12 with free shipping.

So I'm debating how much to get now. In better times, I'd just spend the $80 and max out the memory. But times are tough, and it's an old laptop, and I'm already spending $75 to get a new battery. So maybe I'll just stick to 1GB, or perhaps even half a gig. It wouldn't be quite so annoying if they'd just used 1 stick in the first place. As it is, I'm going to lose half the existing RAM if I upgrade either DIMM slot, so I'm not going to get out of this as cheap as I'd hoped.

Either way, it'll still be nice to have another laptop around, so that Sarah and I aren't fighting over the one. And even if I max out the RAM, it's still way cheaper than getting a new system, so it's still a win-win situation.

Desk upgrade

The second half of my latest upgrade arrived from NewEgg today. I ordered two more gigabytes of RAM - one for my desktop, one for my laptop.

As a brief aside, the laptop upgrade was much smoother than I expected. I'd never tried upgrading a laptop, so I wasn't sure how hard it would be. Turns out adding more RAM to my Inspiron B120 was actually pretty easy. I just followed the Dell service manual. The process was pretty much "open up the correct panel, then slide in RAM module."

The desktop upgrade arrived just in time, since I was about to disassemble and move the system anyway. That's because I just finished "upgrading" my computer desk.
My new computer desk
We've consolidated office space, so Sarah and I are now sharing one large desk. Of course, I still have to finish putting the doors and drawers back in and get some keyboard trays, but it's basically done. I built it out of kitchen cabinets and laminate counter. It's a little higher than a normal desk, but it should serve us well. It will also be a lot sturdier than the pre-fab fiber-board desks its replacing.

Laptop battery life

battery.pngI finally got around to looking up solution to my laptop power problem. I'd actually never really worried about it, since I almost always use the laptop plugged in, but I read a blog post complaining about battery life under Ubuntu, so I figured I'd look into it.

My Dell Inspiron B120 normally got about an hour an ten minutes on battery. I never actually ran Windows on it, so I have no basis for comparison. However, I'd read other comments about people getting two to three times as much battery life on Windows. For instance, my brother's Inspiron 1501 gets about 3 hours.

The good news is that there's "laptop mode." By flipping on the ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE setting in /etc/defaultacpi-support, I gained about 20 or 30 minutes.

The bad news is that there's not an awful lot of other tweaking to be done. There are some other tips on the Ubuntu wiki, but I haven't found anything that seems to make a dramatic difference. At least, not anything I can configure with a truly intimate knowledge of the system.

So basically, it seems like we're kind of out of luck for the time being. But I'm not going to complain too loud. I'm just glad all the hardware in the laptop actually functions.

Edgy and NDISwrapper

Another Edgy problem popped up the other day. In upgraded my laptop and suddenly NDISwrapper no longer worked. The driver wasn't getting loaded and attempting to do it manually with modprobe resulted in an error about an invalid parameter to the driver.

For some reason, just as with theflash drive thing, this problem went away when I booted into an older kernel. (Side note: the USB drive does work normally with the 2.6.17 kernel on the laptop.) Strangely enough, booting with kernel 2.6.15-25 worked perfectly, but 2.6.15-23 gave me the old boot screen and hung on "waiting for root filesystem."

The problem seemed to be that, somewhere in the process, my ndiswrapper-utils package got seriously screwed up. I had the ndiswrapper-utils package, but it seems that this actually depends on ndiswrapper-utils-1.1, which wasn't installed. After looking at the available packages, I actually ended up removing ndiswrapper-utils and installing ndiswrapper-utils-1.8. (I don't know why the default is ndiswrapper-utils-1.1 - you'd think the newer version would be the one to use.) This did the trick and my network card is now working normally.

Cat attack!

Well, that'll teach me to leave my laptop sitting on the table with the cord not taped down to the floor. I'm now two keys short!

It could have been much worse. I left the laptop on the dining room table, which was covered with a table cloth, and had the cord stretched a little to plug it in. I get up for two minutes, and one of the cats apparently pulled on the chord, which pulled the laptop, which pulled the table cloth, and dumps to laptop on my chair. The damage, as far as I can see, consists of broken 'G' and '6' keys. Annoying, but not serious.

Fortunately, I was quickly able to find a replacement keyboard at powerbrixx.com. Now I just have to see if I can replace it when the new keyboard comes in. It shouldn't be too hard - just a bit harder than working on a desktop.

Laptop on the road

So today I took the new laptop (dubbed Epyon, in keeping with my Gundam Wing naming scheme) with me to Barnes & Noble to test out how it works out in the wild. The results so far are mixed, but I can't complain too much.

By way of exposition, I now have almost all the basics set up on the laptop. KDE 3.5 is installed, along with my basic "productivity" applications and multimedia. I've got basics like Opera, JEdit, and KDissert, the akode-mpeg stuff for MP3s, and the Xine engine for Kaffeine. I've cloned the configuration files I really care about along with my ~/bin directory. I'm currently copying the data files I want to work with to the laptop hard drive before I leave. There's probably a better way to do that (maybe something with rsync), but I haven't worked that out yet.

The good news is that taking Epyon on the road turned out to be pretty easy. Suspending to disk - which I'd never even seen before - worked perfectly. The only real problem is that when changing to the DHCP network settings profile I created in KControl (because I use static IPs in my LAN), it didn't automatically request a new IP address. Easily fixed, but annoying.

There's bad news too, though. Although the good news about the bad news (if that makes any sense), is that you can't blame any of it on Linux. The first downer is that the battery only has about 2 hours worth of life in it. And since I left it unplugged last night, apparently I didn't quite start at full charge. But that's Dell's fault. The other bad news is that Barnes & Noble uses AT&T for their WiFi service, meaning it's not free. They give you several options to pay, but I wasn't crazy about any of them. The first was a monthly fee of $19.95 for (presumably) unlimited access to their WiFi network. Not too bad, but I don't plan to use it that much. The second option was pre-paid cards, with the cheapest being $25 for three connections (presumably with no time limit), which seems a bit steep to me. Last, which is probably what I'd go for, was a one-time fee of $3.95 plus tax for a two-hour block. Given that I don't plan to be using the laptop on their network for long periods of time, this didn't seem too horrifying. Still not great, though.

The last thing that I need to comment on is the inherent suckiness of laptop keyboards. These things are obviously not built for heavy typing. I've seen worse (like Panasonic ToughBooks where the keys are rubber and you literally have to use the two-finger method), but it's still not optimal. Plus I find myself routinely screwing up my typing by brushing my thumb on the touch pad. This is really annoying. Of course, I supposed the touch pad is better than a track point, but I would have preferred a trackball. Then again, for $500, I guess I can't be too picky.

The Laptop Saga: Cut Short

Well, that was easy. The new laptop is up and running with Kubuntu Breezy. What's more, I worked on it for less than two hours and everything I've tried is working perfectly.

So here's the deal. On Saturday morning, my neighbor brought over the box with my new Dell Inspiron B120 in it. It was actually delivered $500 worth of laptop sitting on the front steps, so my neighbors picked up for safe keeping. (Thanks guys!) I was out of town until Sunday night, so I didn't get a chance to play with the new system until this afternoon.

By the way, while I was away, I went shopping for a case and USB mouse. I found a nice, padded case with lots of pockets in Staples for $30 and a Logitech optical mouse for $15. This beats the $44 that Dell wanted for a laptop case.

The install was pretty painless, as usual. It took a little longer than expected, because the battery died half way through the installation. (Apparently they don't come pre-charged.) I could have tried to rescue it, but I figured it would just be faster to plug it into the wall and start again, so that's what I did. After the initial install, everything worked except WiFi. Even the integrated sound works. Of course, I haven't tried suspending it yet, but that's not a huge concern for me at the moment.

Getting the integrated Broadcom WiFi card to work was actually surprisingly easy. I pretty much just had to follow the instruction in the Ubuntu NDISwrapper how-to, and it worked. No compiling necessary! Based on the lspci, the integrated WiFi card was the first Broadcom card on the supported cards list. Basically all I had to do was download the two linked files and follow the directions in the how-to and everything worked. In fact, the process was so easy, the Ubuntu team could probably automate the process. Wouldn't that be sweet?

So, I am glad to report that my quest to put Kubuntu on my laptop was cut short when everything unexpectedly worked. I guess it turns out I didn't need to order those Windows CDs after all. In fact, I wish I hadn't, because not only did I not need the driver disk, the CDs are those OEM restore disks, not real Windows, so they're basically useless for anything except restoring the system you bought them for.