System is an ASUS brand unit, rescued it from the dust bin, so to speak.
Bought an off-brand universal Power Brick for it after seeing it boot up one time on something we should not have plugged it into.
I made an investment in a Samsung SSD; if it turns out this system isn't worth campaigning any further, I can always yank the new drive and use it elsewhere.
It's already tapped out @ 4Gigs of RAM, so I'll have to make my piece with that, and truthfully I also have an even older laptop that currently runs w/ 1Gig of memory, and can only hold two Gig max, and I find it sort of okay, so...
I'm a defaulter to running Linux as a daily OS, and I see no profit in MS Vista so I stuck Ubuntu Studio on the new drive, and promptly suffered through many and repeated freezing-up situations, most of which I attributed to Heat build up.
I popped the thing open and as a short-term stop gap I mushed up the old thermo-paste and clamped the heatsinks (funny, I keep wanting to spell that 'heat syncs') back down again. I don't have my tube of 'silver-something-magic-goop' handy, so I'm going to get a second supply in a day or two.
Renewing the heat exchangers helped a bit, but ultimately I started to realize I wasn't going to be doing real-time, non-sequential audio and video editing and rendering on this rig so I've reinstalled a different OS, this time Lubuntu.
Only one, maybe two freezes since, over a two week(?) period...
Didn't need to devolve to a 32bit version, 64bit has been OK.
So far it's doing all the things I need a computer on the road needs to do, EXCEPT for the fully depleted battery which is the one non-reversible purchase I'm going to probably pull the trigger on in the next week.
There ya go, my SquareHeads, and don't ferget the Random Button...
Laptop Resurrection - It came w/ Windows VISTA
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