Installed Linux on an old windows laptop. This is my conversation 5 minutes ago...

Wife: "Have how you got internet?"
Me: "What do you mean, it has a wireless adapter built in?"
Wife: "But it's not Windows?"

WTF!!!

Me: "Pass my phone, this is going on devRant"
Wife: "Please no, not again"

*Mom shows me laptop ad of 3000 bucks with the most overkill specs ever*

Mom: "Son, will this laptop run Google?"

Me: "Do you want to surf Google or actually run Google's server?"

Mom: *looks confused*

"I also want to use Fesabook on it"

Me: *brings her a 5 year old laptop with a new ssd in it*

*has an old i3, 8gb ram and no gpu*

Mom: "This laptop is super fast! Thanks son!"

*One hour later*

*Mom calls*

"Son, I think the laptop broke"

Me: "What? What happened?"

Mom: "I pressed a button and now all the keys are lighting red" (backlit keyboard)

Me: "You can choose the color of your keyboard mom"

Mom: "Ooh! How do I make it pink?"

Me: "You can only choose between red and blue..."

Mom: "What a ripoff"

*Hangs up the phone*

My 80 year old very absent minded dad made a website, all by himself, using a two decades old book he got from the thrift store.

He's even hosting it himself on an old laptop running Debian, including a redirect to a beautiful nostalgic /~username/index.htm url (not gonna share the link, because his personal details are on there).

The whole site is incredibly carefully crafted, and I'm super proud of him.

Who cares if it's not a React app? The 14 kilobytes of HTML 4.0 markup load in 20-30ms, and it renders pretty much perfectly in every browser including Internet Explorer 4 and Edge.

🤷‍♂❤️

My boss is technically restricted shall we say.

As the cto I have also been designated office IT guy. Which means apparently fixing the printer. Which is ok I guess. I mean it's bullsh*t but hey.

Anyway, about 6 months ago he said he needed a new laptop. He lives his life in excel and outlook, and even though the whole company uses google docs for everything he still exports everything to excel, makes a copy, then saves it back to drive so everything gets out of sync.

It's a fun problem that I have banned everyone from doing obviously but he continues.

Anyway, anyway, he wanted a new windows laptop naturally. I said to spend about £700 on a decent machine rather than buying something cheap that will frustrate and not last long.

He doesn't listen and gets some old windows 7 machine for £300. It's an alright spec for 2009; he must not have got the memo about it being 2017.

4 months go by and he says he needs a new laptop because this one is too slow (not least because he opens 400 chrome tabs and never reboots his machine). Anyway, I fix the problem of uninstalling all his bloatware and it runs quicker but he has his heart set on a new machine.

He insists.

I suggest he spend the money this time so he literally doesn't buy a new one in 4 months. I suggest the surface book that's £1200. A little overpriced but he will love the touch screen, it's powerful enough and it's windows. Ticks all the boxes for him.

He suddenly decides he wants a Mac.

I tell him it will be a nightmare for everyone if he does that.

He insists.

I suggest the Mac book pro as I've had mine for 6 years now and it's still going strong. It's a little more expensive than the surface but it will last.

He then says he wants the air.

I say they haven't updated them in ages and they aren't actually that powerful.

He insists.

That night he just buys an air from the Apple Store.

WHY THE FU*k ARE YOU ASKING ME FOR ADVICE IF YOURE NOT GOING TO LISTEN YOU MOTHERFUC*er. WASTING MY TIME AND YOURS.

Was very close to rage quitting when he wanted me to back up his old machine but didn't bring in his hard drive and didn't want to put it in the cloud. #whatDoYouWantMeToDoWithYourOldPornCollection

To top it all off I ran some benchmarks and my 6 year old Mac book pro is more powerful than his "brand new" air.

When you work for school IT you find these kinds of things sometimes when cleaning the office. And yes it's fully functional

Was letting my five year old cousin play on my laptop today. She was writing numbers in notepad, and after typing '123', she erased them because she wanted to start over from 0 instead.

Later she started typing 1 and 0 repeatedly in random sequence.

She may be a robot. Either way, I sense a bright future ahead for her.

Just realized I'm using an almost decade old Acer aspire laptop for programming. And its still useful because Linux.

> installs devRant app on my iPhone
> too lazy to type my 18-char random password on mobile
> password manager app not on App Store yet
> dig up my old Macbook
> install XCode & homebrew package manager
> install 2 other package managers using homebrew
> install App deps from the 2 package managers
> query stackoverflow for why my deps fail to install
> open App in XCode
> setup Apple provisioning profile
> trust my certificate on my iPhone
> dig up an old router & setup a local WiFi network
> start a server on my laptop to serve my PGP keys
> download my PGP keys to my iPhone
> app crashes
> open an issue on github with steps to reproduce & stacktrace
...
> type my 18-char random password
> rant on how I wasted an entire afternoon

Mam: Hey can I ask you a question about Facebook?

Me: (Christ give me strength) ... sure whats up?

Mam: You know when you get a notification and you click on it and see what someone uploaded?

Me: ... you are not on Facebook, you can't be getting notifications

Mam: well I do. Is it possible to...

Me: No hang on a second, it is 110% not possible for this to happen. Something else is going on that you think is a notification.

Mam: You know when you are on, and you see a message like "12 new notifications"

Me: on? on what? this is happening on your phone is it? Can I see?

Mam: No its on my laptop at home.

Me: ... you have an old laptop with an old windows, you can't get notifications on it.

Mam: OH FOR GOD SAKE! ... you know when you are in your emails and it says "12 new notifications"?

Me: ... right so we are talking about EMAILS about unread notifications and not getting notifications on your phone. So you have an old account then that you don't use?

Mam: Yeah I don't know the password to it, haven't logged in, in years.

Me: of course

Mam: Right anyway. When I get one and click on it, lets say its about you, can you see me reading your notifications?

Me: ..... you can't not read my notifications.

Mam: uh, can you see me reading your emails then smart arse?

Me: ... can't do that either.

Mam: So what the hell am I doing then?

Me: You are reading a post someone uploaded, which you got alerted to from an email.

Mam: Right, can you tell when I've read your POST then?!?!?!

Me: no

Mam: was that so hard?

Me: ... yep

Sister = bee ( who isn't a stranger to Ubuntu)
Me = Cee

Bee: can I use your laptop?
Cee : why ? Use yours ,it's works fine.
Bee : no I want to use yours and I need to work with windows.
Cee: 🤯
Bee : my work can only be done using windows.
Cee : fine do whatever ( doesn't want to argue )
* Le bee opens MS word, and starts her work *
Cee : 😤😤Seriously?
Bee : I don't like libre
Cee : 😑😑😑^∞
* Few moments later *
Bee : my work is done ,you can have your laptop,btw it's updating.
Cee : 😑😑😑😑😑
* 2000 years later *
*Opens Ubuntu *
*Getting a weird bug*
*Tried to fix *
*Can't open OS files * 👏👏👏🎆
* Windows not shutdown properly *
* Opens windows *
* Not able to login via pin *
* Password ? not accepted *
* Changes outlook password *
* Please chose a password you haven't chosen before *
* Logs in *
* types old pin to change pin *
*You've entered wrong pin too many times *
*System hanging a lot *
* Removes pin *
* Gets huge mcAfee restart system popups , every 10 sec *
* Just shutdown , feels irritated for the rest of the day*

* Regrets dual booting, shd have wiped the windows partition 😫😫*

*Wonders,what the hell did my sister even do to my laptop ?*

My old laptop had an ear bud warmer right here. This new one is defective, those ear buds are still cold.

I'll get to my four words in a sec, but let me set the background first.

This morning, at breakfast, I fired up my trusty laptop only to get a fan failure warning.

Finally, after the three year old is asleep tonight, I'm able to start dismantling the case to get to the fan. I'm hoping it just needs cleaned out.

Hard drive, memory, and keyboard spread out over the kitchen table. I'm not even halfway done.

Guess what? Now I'm one of the lucky 3500 people to have a power outage at 9 pm. Estimated restore time: 2 am.

Sigh.

"All those tiny screws"

And a three year old in the house...

I was bored of using my laptop keyboard so I crafted a sliding keyboard holder to replace my old drawer ^^
It took me some hours but I am proud enough of the result !

1. Connect your laptop to prod-vpn
2. Open SQL Server Management Studio for debugging
3. Walk away
4. Find your 3 year old at your laptop
5. Panic.
6. Thank Microsoft for locking the screen when the laptop sleeps.

So today I had a client come in and give me a free "broken" laptop that wouldnt turn on and was covered in grease and what appeared to be dog hair everywhere. So i go through my every day troubleshooting, found the problem and fixed it. Next i disassemble the entire laptop and just start air dusting and cleaning connections like crazy. Now I'm a proud owner of a really old school laptop that I can probably keep alive for another 10 years :) This will be a perfect machine to test arch linux on 😃

Not bad for a free laptop xD

So I found an old laptop in the garbage, it had a better fan so I dremeled out my old fan and glued in the salvaged fan. It fits like a glove. All wired in and ready to go.

Oooh, got one. Not a question, but a mind-blowing moment:

For some reason, my parents put my email address on one of their accounts, and it was an old one that I had stopped using years ago. Then, this conversation with my parents happens, at their home with the laptop I gave them sitting open on the table:

me: "you guys should probably give them your email address."
mom: "we don't have one."
me: "what about dad's?"
dad: "no, I don't have an email address."
me: "you used to have one. what happened to it?"
dad: "that one was at the library. I don't have one here."
me: 😑

My father apparently doesn't know the basic concept of the internet and its global nature.

yesterday my boss called me to his office.
(him) - Please close the door
(me thinking) - My God, this is gonna be serious. He never closes his doors
(him) - It's a common practice here that we buy a new laptop for new colleges. What kind of laptop do you have?
(me relieved and excited) - Well it's 4 years old shit, 8 Gb of RAM, slow
(him) - Great we'll buy you this i7, big SSD, 32 Gb of RAM + new monitor, mouse and keyboard.

I was excited as fuck.

Until he sent me what he bought. It's much worse laptop than that I have 😑 Only thing that is better is it has 16 Gb of RAM.
I guess I'll just take that RAM off it and put it in my machine (if it is DDR3, God please may it be DDR3)

Not a rant, but had to come here to post this.

I couldn't resist pranking my wife with the age old "Oh my God, I broke your laptop" prank.

SHE DID NOT FIND IT AS FUNNY AS I DID.

Anyone else tried it? If not, definitely try it.

Just finished installing Deepin OS on my old laptop as an attempt to get familiar with linux (coming from win10). It looks gorgeous, I got at least four orgasms from the installation process alone. And it comes with lots of cool apps preinstalled (Chrome, Spotify, Steam, etc). So far I'm very happy with it.

Old boy said to put my brother's old laptop to use for him because Windows is too slow. He just wants basic usage like news and checking his favorite sites. So, you know there's only one way to take care of this...install Ubuntu. He tried it, loved and now doing full install for him. Ubuntu saving old computers since..well since forever 😁

I recently found an old laptop and turned on. It was running Windows but was too slow to use. I had Linux installed and it runs like new. I now have a laptop to use with no extra charge. Thanks Linux!

Found an old monitor in our garage and decided to hook it up to my laptop. Yes, I am learning how to use Linux :D

On a tiny vacation in another country. Don't have a converter plug (for the power sockets) so borrowed one.

*connects laptop to charger* (old charger which might die soon)
*nothing happens*
*slight panic*
*tries different sockets*
*nothing*
😨😲😭
"you might want to check your phone with that thing as the socket seems loose as hell"
*tries phone with charger that definitely works*
*nothing*

😰🙌

That was a fucking panic attack right there 😅

Well here is my new setup.
Left and center screens are connected to one laptop. Where I run my editors and terminals.
Rightmost is connected to another old laptop. This is for browsing and slack.
Using synergy to share mouse and keyboard.
What do you think of this setup? Any better way to do this?

This is a very old laptop and I've just noticed it has something on top ;)

You can kill me for this...
I've one old printer and and I wanted to print some pages. So I did following steps

1. Plugged printers power cable and turned it on.
2. Connected included cable to printer.
3. Opened PDF and tried to print
4. Did step 3 for fucking 20minutes

What went wrong?
I fucking forgot to connect USB cable to my fucking laptop. FML...

Installed Fedora in a partition on my old Acer laptop having never used Linux before. It's so much faster than Windows 10!

And the terminal is pretty 😍

Continuation of the story with Linux Mint 20 Cinnamon on the old Core2 Duo with 2 GB RAM and HDD. The guy has had that PC under Linux for 1.5 months now, had never had Linux before, has no IT background, and is over 70.

Upon visit, I checked how the machine was doing. OK, he had forgotten to apply the updates, so I highlighted paying attention to the red icon in the tray. Launched the updates, all ran through.

Otherwise, he had managed to install Skype all by himself (network effect because of his family...) and had bought a webcam plus a microphone. Linux had just recognised everything without any fuzz. Even his Skype buddies were impressed, he said.

On top of that, he likes how much faster that PC is compared to his much more current Win 10 laptop and actually uses the old Linux PC more than the laptop.

He also enjoys that Linux doesn't do weird things all by itself all the time. That's not his experience with Win 10.

The worst part of getting a new laptop is having to say goodbye to all the stickers you invested on your old one

DevOps required skillset:

* Frontend engineering
* Backend services
* Database administrator
* Security consultant
* Project management
* 3rd party contract negotiator
* Build system monitor
* Build system hostage negotiator
* Paging, alerting, monitoring
* Search server admin
* Old search server admin
* Old-old-new search server admin
* Redis, ElasticSearch, MySQL, PostGres, owner
* Agile coach
* No you shouldn't do that coach
* Oh, you did that anyway coach
* DNS: (Optional) It'll replicate when it wants, and how it wants to to anyway
* Multi-Cloud deployment strategist
* Must be able to translate Klingon to YAML, and YAML to MySQL
* Cost analyzer, reducer, and justifier
* Complex documentation generation in markdown that we should have done years ago anyway
* Marketing's email went to spam analyzer
* Wordpress is broke fixer
* Where the fuck does Wordpress run anyway?
* Ability to fix MySql running Wordpress on marketing's dusty laptop

*me working on my laptop and the playlist decides to shuffle an old favourite of mine*

Oooh, I should increase the volume!

*presses the volume-up button on laptop to no effect*

*taps vigorously in vain and almost starts swearing*

What the hec..

Shit! Earphone's plugged to phone.

New to Linux.... Installed Manjaro xfce in an old laptop.... accidentally activated warp speed xD

I wasn't the brightest when I started with computers...
I had one in my room for homework and such (an old one that mom had for work and then upgraded to a laptop).

It ran SO FREAKING SLOW and didn't have Internet (I was maybe 6, no need to pay AOL anymore than we already did).

I had a floppy disk that said" Quicken" on it... Brilliant little 6 year old me thought that JUST BY INSERTING the floppy, I could speed my computer up. Not by installing THE FINANCIAL SOFTWARE, just by putting the floppy in the drive...

I've come a little ways since then...

Note: I accidentally installed it and thought I was going to break my computer because I couldn't uninstall it (pulling the floppy out obviously didn't uninstall it)... All my experience prior to this was watching my teacher use Mac at school

Changed the battery and extended the RAM; 6 years old dying laptop resurrected.
What a great day 🤗

After over 2 months of not opening devRant, here I go again.

My dad's laptop is dying so I decided to give him my old one (because I ordered a new laptop). I asked him if should I keep Linux on it, or should I install Windows. He said "ehh, keep the Linux". So there it is! Linux Mint on top of Dell Latitude E6320 and another person converted to Linux!

Also sorry for not posting just a SS.

My laptop started making faint high-pitched noises - I hope I misheard and it's actually just some coil singing inside the power-supply and not one of the disks/something else - also, I seem to have dropped 4GB of RAM suddenly where there should be 8GB.

(Also, I should really wipe the messed up dual-boot still residing on disk from last semester and replace it by a fresh arch-only install. (No time and joy in debugging that right now.) Probably something for tomorrow evening.)

The device is ~8 years old by now and starting to fall apart - nothing duct tape can't fix - but I'm somewhat worried about the rest right now. D:

Meh, I really need that laptop during the next two weeks, I just hope the hardware doesn't die on me in the meantime because I can't wait for an order to arrive, let alone afford some cheap replacement.

TLDR; My 2TB HDD got wiped in one fell swoop by a 9-year old child.

You know... I've never been too great about keeping backups. Even to this day, I only keep one or two local backups and nothing on the "cloud".

So this was about 5 years ago. At the time, I was living together with my girlfriend - who would later become my wife. She had a son from a previous relationship, who at the time was 9 years old.

I had a small desk in the living room of our one-bedroom apartment, that I used for my computer, which has been a laptop for a long time now. One unfortunate thing about the layout of the apartment was that the wall plug near my desk was attached to a light switch.

I had a 2TB external hard drive - with its own power cable - plugged into my laptop. Then, things started to move in slow motion... The GF's son comes inside from playing, my GF asks him to turn off the light. He reaches over, and shuts off power to my laptop - and the external hard drive.

He must have hit that switch at JUST the right fucking time. The laptop ran on battery, no big deal. The hard drive, when I powered it back up - was wiped clean. I tried data recovery on it, but the HDD was encrypted, which makes things more complicated.

Needless to say, I was not happy. I never got that data back, but I did learn not to expose my hard drives to 9 year olds. Very dangerous little creatures.

You want to know the best part? He destroyed another hard drive of mine, a few years later. Should I tell that story?

I used to work in a tech shop. Old lady brings her laptop in claiming viruses broke her Gmail. I do the diagnostic, it's relatively clean with a bit of browser adware and tracking cookies. I call her and let her know there was nothing wrong with her Gmail and that it's good to go (she approved a tune up). She comes in and gets it. She calls later saying Gmail is still broken. I invite her to bring it in so we can have a look together (knowing for sure she was the problem). So we open up Gmail together and she shows me what she's doing. She's clicking on the sender and getting the contact card instead of the email opening. I show her how to actually open the email. She doesn't understand. I spend twenty more minutes explaining how to open an email. And this is the wk13 kicker, she waits until after twenty minutes to ask what "click" means. I was so done. That lady was too old to be using a computer.

Since everyone is posting their system, I'll do it now, too:

- Type: Laptop
- Age: about 5 years
- Weight: 2-3 kg (too much)
- Modifications: Paper below problematic keys; Samsung Evo 850 250GB SSD
- Usecase: School-Laptop with every Office-Suite I could find.
- Pros: Wrecks my PC with the boottime (Gnome > KDE); Looks really sick; Really lightweight Arch installed; Quiet when not under load
- Cons: Really heavy; Battery old and unreliable; Bluetooth stops working after closing lid

How come everyone has so many cool setups at their workplace and I have a fucking 4 year old laptop that hangs thrice everyday.. FML 😕

What I imagine when I run
"sudo apt install texlive-full"
on my old, shitty laptop...

!rant

So, I imagine this little prank is about as old as graphical OS interfaces, but anyways.. Now and then I will take a screenshot of someone's desktop, set that image as their wallpaper, then hide all their icons, make their taskbar (or plural for Linux) to the smallest possible size, and wait for them to try use their PC.

One day a few years back, I tried to catch my mom with this trick, but although it was still pretty epic, it did not happen quite as I expected.

Suffice to say with her knowledge of keyboard shortcuts, she actually used her laptop for about an hour before she noticed none of the taskbar buttons were working.

Yay for trying to prank people who actually know how to use a computer. Lol.

I've just been given a beautiful turd of a PC with only 512MB RAM to get ready for someone in the residence. Way too small for any modern Windows or even Linux with a halfway decent GUI. And the user doesn't have any technical background so I highly doubt that they'll be able to maintain a Linux system. Windows XP is full of security issues but it might just be able to run on that craptop. Due to me knowing that it's a vulnerable system though, I've got an ethical issue with that. Windows XP is insecure but at least the user would be able to use it.. and Linux is secure but it'd never get updated, and I really don't want that guy to come knock on my door every time he wants to install a piece of software.. the guy fucking stinks! What would you do in a situation like that?

I just installed Ubuntu on my old laptop and Jesus that terminal is just amazing. Now I see why GUI is for noobs.

*receives an old business laptop as payment for refurbishing another one*

Hmm, this thing doesn't have a charger with it.. looks like it's taking 18.5V.. my HP laptop's charger supplies that but its barrel connector doesn't fit 🤔

Regular users: oh dear now I have to buy a charger with a fitting connector for this.. where do I even start?!
Me: Well I guess I could just remove the charging port and solder some wires straight into the board instead 🤔

But that voltage.. my HP laptop's charger is still in use and I don't really want to fuck around with that one.

Regular users: oh dear oh dear, shouldn't I just throw this laptop away?
Me: well I guess that I could just use one of the rails of my upgraded lab bench power supply for it?

Lab electronics saving the day, every day, time and time again.. fuck yeah 😎

Woke up this morning to the message below:

"I have [ insert name ]'s old laptop. Can you please have a look at it , i mean to see if it can be fixed.It seems fine."

Long story short.. Windows 10 out, Elementary OS in! While I enjoy this pizza at the same time. Funny thing is, the time taken to install Elementary OS was shorter than the time Windows was taking to update this laptop..oh well, another old PC joins the Linux laptops in the house.

I worked someplace once that fired a person for lack of quality output. Before that he sued the company over a labor dispute. After they fired him he went and founded his own business. A year later the company decided to recycle his old laptop to another developer and discovered the source code and business prospectus on it. The company took it to court and said it was actually their business because it was created on its own equipment and the time stamps confirm during business hours also. Courts agreed and they got possession of his business and then fired him again.

Windows 10 as a development environment... Oh freakin' goody.
📍Multi-montor is finicky
📍Text scaling is still horribly broken
📍It takes longer to resume from standby than my old laptop takes to boot up from a cold start
📍Color matching LCD monitors is pants-on-head retarded
📍32GB of RAM isn't going to be enough...

This is going to be a long summer in corporate land.

They want me to be a speaker at this event , I wrote them this

Regarding this statement on the speaker form “Presentation rooms are set up theatre style with a lectern, lectern mic, screen, laptop with Windows XP Office

2007/Vista XP and a projector.” – is it just an old form?

I do have one question what does this mean exactly?  Are you actually using windows xp? it’s not supported by Microsoft anymore, so it’s quite dangerous to have unless it’s not attached to the internet what so ever and never has been. Vista… is not much better. Windows 7 is 2008 you should at least be using that I would of thought? I mainly ask because if I am going to speak about technology and computers I can’t exactly say I’m an expert when I’m using tech as old as that. I mean I’m 20 I was 7 when xp came out, I know how to use it but it’s ancient, in computer terms It’s as old as Aztec times and I’d rather not be sacrificed to a sun god (seriously if anyone who knows tech at all sees me I’ll be embarrassed and taken the piss out of majorly).

Could I just use my laptop? If needs be?

Sorry to be a pain

Goodbye T430p, you served long and did a good job.

Summer is coming, and i suppose all of you will buy a new barbecue to cook some meat, but i have another economic alternative.

How to make a homemade bbq:

1) Take an old laptop
2) Turn it on
3) Install Android studio (also works with intellij)
4) Add a lot of gradle (or maven) depencies
5) Code something cool (or not)
6) Build and compile it
7) Now you can put your meat on your laptop
8) Enjoy your meal

Bought a macbook air last day with available budget i had - my first apple machine. I find it funny that, I learned cool trackpad gestures on my old Windows laptop that i didn't even know existed! - only because i spend few hrs with this macbook.

Thanks apple.

To all my linux peeps... and don't get on me about which OS and better and all that crap!

Anyway, until I decide on a new laptop, I am using my dad's old machine running Windows 10. I also have an old desktop with a first-gen core i3, 8gb ram, 500gb HDD. What I'd like to do is run linux on the desktop and remote into it from my laptop. Is there a good way to RDP in to linux from Windows and preserve the full experience (like RDP from Windows to Windows)?

I know it is 1 week too late but i dont care. Im aware that my workbench looks like shit but in reality it is a "creative mess"

@Condor Do you envy me now? I have 1054z that is hacked and has all its features unlocked! I have desoldering station and crappy (very crappy) soldering station. In addition to that i got simple sine/square generator that goes to 1Mhz (old communist poland tech - indestructible and great)

Situation with my pc is complicated. My main pc (with the curved monitor)
-i5 3350p
-12 Gb or ram (2*4Gb and another 4 that friend gave me)
-radeon 7800hd (*RIP* cant play games anymore 😥)
-256Gb sata SSD
-2Tb WD blue HDD

In addition to that i have a laptop
i5 4 cores, 8Gb ram, 1Tb HDD, GTX1050

I use my lap for gaming now, i even connected that monitor as main lap.
(double monitors yay!) sometimes i use my old pc for minor things but i use rdp for that, it is great experience! (my lap displaying rdp from my old pc on second monitor that was my old pcs main one 😂 i find it a tiny bit funny)

My car window got broken this night and they robbed some of my stuff.. Well I lost around 100€ in stuff so it's meaningless, but I have to get my car repaired, and most of all, they stole that old shitty laptop that I use as a seed box and for file syncing. It was my first own computer too, it had about 7 years :/

My step mother told me she has an old laptop from which she wanted to extract the email address book. I highly doubt of them (less than 20) are still up to date. Some of them are from dead ISPs 😰

I'm honestly surprised about the immediate respond times and that it still works pretty well.

You know you're getting old when...

I look at my younger bro's laptop and can't recognize some of the app he's using

When you watch the new Jason Bourne and see people from CIA hacking a laptop from an Old cellular with a "shell code", or other people saying "use SQL to hack the database"

"Linux is shit because nothing works on my new DOM 2017/2018 laptop!"

Yes it's true that nothing will work if you put your finking ubuntu 14.04 installation with a fucking old 3.13 kernel in your new Laptop!

Update. Your. Fucking. System.

Continued from previous post.

As the chill wind blows outside, the man picks up his laptop and phone. Slowly walks towards his bed and lifts an old hoodie. With easy he slides it on him, pulls the hood over his head. He turns around facing the window. On the back of his old hoodie, there is a design which looks faded and discolored. Below it some words which too are faded. He walks towards the window and glances on the street. It's still empty. All he can hear is the wind.
"Perfect", he says to himself and walks out his room.
As he is about to exit the building, he sees an Apache chopper passing above. It zooms above the street. A wild guess he makes, probably it's heading where he is heading.
His phone vibrates with a message.
"It's ready".

Found this gem 😂

TRANSLATION

Java for believing programmers

For who?
Young male,
which want to pray together,
and at the same time make first
steps in programming

How old you need to be?
Up to 25 years

What do you need?
Holy Bible
Laptop
*you just need 500 mb RAM and WinXP

It was a Monday morning, and I did what most people do - I got up late. When I came to senses, I realized I have an important client meeting today.
I ran towards my closet and grabbed my favorite shirt, but it was a mess, badly wrinkled.

But no problem, I decided to put this task on my old but trusty laptop, I waked up my laptop (Which has just celebrated its 12th birthday yesterday), it literally coughed 100 times as i opened 3-4 chrome tabs and android studio on it. Within a minute , my newly found laptop-iron become as hot as the surface of sun, i gently placed my shirt under it and in 5 seconds my shirt was looking brand new !!! I quickly got dressed up , while my laptop was cursing me at the back.

Luckily my meeting went well and we secured a new project, on my way home I was happy and satisfied that my oldy has found a new purpose of life as a makeshift iron.

I returned home, and to my surprise my laptop was'nt turning on....!!! I though maybe its tired from todays work so i let him rest..........

Dropped by my old uni to visit some friends. Met an old classmate who wanted to ask me something about his Python code.

"Oh, no", I thought to myself. "I haven't touched Python in so long, I don't know if I can help, and even then I only knew how to do menial tasks in it!", thinking how to save face and my image of "programmer dropout".

5 minutes later I realized he was mistaking a dictionary for a JSON string, AND was trying to access a dictionary in a list... in a dictionary.

I quietly fixed his print statement which incited an excitement "oh wow, it works!" and quietly returned his laptop. Fun day.

Old-ish pic from my setup (back then when you could actually see the desk under all that clutter).
Usually I work from the desktop, but there's also a dockingstation to connect the laptop to the screens and peripherals.

(and yeah I know the speaker placement is horrible)

Boss: [tells me to do a thing]

Me: [does a thing]

Boss: [mad because I didn't do the thing his way]

Me: [physically numb from putting up with this shit for 3y now]

I've been checked out at work for awhile now, but today was some next level BS. I had to throw together an application demo in 3hr, couldn't take lunch today because I needed to sign for a package, sold an 3y old laptop on Ebay (and got chewed out because he thinks it's worth more than that).

The only reason I still show up to this shit-show of an office, is I don't want to leave my only other coworker with our boss.. That, and my interview isn't until monday....

Oh wow, so many memorable co-workers, though typically not in a positive way. I guess the most memorable was this project manager who got his job solely through nepotism. He was a fucking moron, putting it lightly. He would rattle off buzzwords and jargon that he had randomly picked up in a completely nonsensical way, which made him sound even more ridiculous. He didn't seem to notice our blank stares.

Anyway, since he loved to show everyone just how awesome he was, he had to have the latest and greatest laptop. He had some top-of-the-line model which cost an insane amount of cash back in the day, but of course he got bored of it when something better came out six months later. So he decided to sell his old laptop.

Now, this was his personal laptop he was selling but we were about three months away from launching a top-secret project which had a seven figure budget and a lot riding on it. So what did this absolute goose do? He sold his laptop unformatted with a metric shit ton of confidential files and documents on it. As fate would have it... he sold it to someone who just so happened to work for a competing company.

Cut to about two and a half months later, around two weeks before the launch of this massive project, our competition comes out with something incredibly similar and beat us to market. Aghast, senior management then found out that they had obtained a treasure trove of confidential information from this numpty's laptop, handed to them on a silver platter.

The following Monday, with a sombre mood in the office, this guy cheerfully comes in through the door and is immediately yanked into the boardroom by management. What followed was around thirty minutes of brutal, relentless, non-stop shouting, table- banging and obscenities. When it finally stopped, the door quietly opened, this guy walks out as white as a sheet, turns towards the exit and left the building.

We never saw him again.

i met an old friend in a mall and he start talk about linux

friend: hey i just installed arch linux in my laptop!
me: wow cool! you are so expert.
friend: btw i have a problem with it, how to change directory in their black screen?
me: cd?
friend: no! i didn't use cd. i use flashdisk to install it.
me: ah.. okay.

Intel core i3 4th generation laptop

3 years old.

Plays csgo at 70fps lowest resolution 800x600

Thinks of upgrading laptop

Sad, only one memory slot

More sad, maximum 8gb ram support

But happy,

This fucking piece of shit lasted way too long than time itself xD

When people ask you to speed up their old crappy device, whether it's a phone, laptop or tablet (even though I'm a web developer), all I say is:

"Buy a new one, that isn't cheap and nasty"

Last I started my new job, and I got 2 new laptops (one from my job, amd a separate from the client, as I'll be there full time for at least a year). The work one was pricy af imo (P50, ~2500$ ex. VAT), then I got the client one... wtf is wrong with these people, the laptop cost fucking 6000$ (again, ex. VAT).

Now on the personal side I'm cheap as fuck, and the current laptop I use is one that was meant to be scrapped at my old job that I took home to fix. While it's fun getting those laptops, my brain cannot stop thinking "why the fuck do I need 64 gb ram, 2tb storage and 500gb NVME ssd to basically write text?"

Just bought an SSD for my mother's 8 year laptop (i5). I suggested her to let me install Linux, since it would definitely run smoother than Win 10, and she finally agreed. Let's hope she gets used to it.
Btw, I was thinking either on Ubuntu or Mint. (Suggestions welcome)

My 5 years old pc died, had to pull out my 12 year old laptop back

Never used VIM

WISH ME LUCK BOIS

Home office!

-Everyday PC
-Laptop for the convenient mobility.
-Old Mac Mini for iOS builds.

Here is where I pretend to do work.

Please stop making stuff with JavaScript.
I have a fairly old and slow laptop.

Hack-intosh your old shitty HP. No shame at all! Just joy and fun. 😂 This laptop enjoyed its latest days of life.

Friend : hey! I wanna buy a laptop.. range is about entry level nothing hi fi! But it should work for 3-4 years.

Me : sure.. give me a few hours..i'll get back.

*Looks all around foe the best thing in that price range.

*Sends a list of laptops ranked based on value for money.

Friend : bought it! Yay! 😎😎😎

*Buys the shittiest laptop they could find at that price range with an absolute old age processor.

Why the fuck did you even ask me at the first place? Fucked couple of hours for me.

Old setup of mine. I'll post a new one when I go to another adventure.

the black thing behind the laptop is my sneaker, and sorry it's a repost

Let's play "Count the operating systems in my household"! I'll start:

- Windows 10 Pro on 1tb drive in desktop
- Windows 10 Enterprise VM on desktop
- Ubuntu 18 VM on desktop
- Ubuntu WSL on desktop
- Ubuntu 18 on seconds drive in desktop
- Manjaro on Cheap laptop
- Manjaro on old, expensive laptop
- Windows 10 Pro on new expensive laptop
- Windows 10 Enterprise VM on new expensive laptop

Just realized I have no dual booters :o

My girlfriend needed a flash drive to back up her Chromebook. I took an old 7g I had and formatted it to exfat (standard procedure here, nothing special). She plugged it in and had some issues with it, so I told her to see erase the drive from her Chromebook. Chromebook said it would delete all 4 terabytes (4tb) from the drive. Lol. Don't know how that happened, and was tempted to try it to see how it went, but did not want to mess up her laptop or wait days for a supposed 4 TB drive to format.

Tl;dr: girlfriends Chromebook thought a 7gb flash drive was 4tb

Took me a few hours, but managed to finally run Adobe Photoshop CC 2018 on my old school Toshiba laptop running Arch Linux xD Still needs some work, but super happy I got it running :D

The company I work for insists on having windows on every work laptop although the work I do doesn't require windows. I bought a new hdd, replaced the old one and installed gentoo. Not sure if they could fire me if they found out, however my productivity increased from the first day on.

Found an old laptop in the apartment I was staying in and wrote a shitty incremental game in HTML and JavaScript with no libraries because there was no interwebs. At least alcohol is mega cheap in eastern Europe.

I finally got to updating my old laptop when I saw a post about Ubuntu 18.04 being released. What do you guys think of it?

So my MacBook pro (retina 2013) is almost 5 years old. I like os x so was shopping for a new one, 3 grand for very marginal performance boost and a touchable bar.... Hmm. I guess my current can survive until apple makes a laptop with some balls.

OK, I love Linux. But I hate the whole "sacrifice-functionality-so-it-can-be-completely-free-and-open-source" thing.

I tried to install Linux a while back on my old laptop, and getting Wi-Fi to work was a nightmare. Apparently they didn't have the right driver for my Wi-Fi card, because it wasn't "free" enough for them. ugh. Most people prefer for their computer to WORK than for every single piece of code to be open source. Who modifies their Wi-Fi driver and redistributes it?

Ugh. Linux is cool, but not this part.

!rant

My laptop is 8 years old this year. She’s still going strong but her Core 2 Duo is starting to show. I need a new dev laptop so I can put all my cool dev stickers on. Sponsorships? 😬

Had a laptop on which i learned programming. bought a new convertible for uni, so i passed my laptop to my younger sister.
-> time to move data from old to new device. thought i didn't have that much data, mostly installed programs, so i thought alright i'm fine.
sister doesn't know how to reset so i do it ...
halfway through the reset process i realize i forgot all my programs i had written, including many java, a c#, and some written android apps i was kinda proud of ... plus my neural network i had finally finished with much struggle😥
there goes my history *poof* when i got worse in school 'cause of programming ... smth in me died in that moment 😑

My grandfather gave me a laptop of a friend of his, to install an OS.

His friend had a new hard drive installed and apparently they sold him an SSD. He told me that the company that installed it, told him that it was better because it was more expensive.

Of course, an old fellow needs SSD for simple things like YouTube and such.

#firstworldproblems #ssd

I pressed "update" on windows 10 and its been runn..

Wait nevermind, it finished in about 5 minutes on my old dual core laptop with a 5400rpm hard drive.

Haveing Arch Linux on my old laptop. Before Arch it was slow. Now I have OS so minimalistic that there's almost nothing after booting.
I even have to start GUI manualy beacouse I don't need it always.
Almost non of my friends can use it so my data is safe here (I like privacy).
But for downside I imagine useing vim in text envirement during flight. Non tech guys can assume that useing vim is plane hijacking.

Was using six years old laptop with first gen Intel core i3 to train a neural net, placed the laptop on soft bed, training begins, thermal shutdown after 30-40 iterations(30 minutes).F***.
Now starting again :'|

Not backing up my 4 year projects folder on my 5 years old laptop...

RIP long forgotten projects

Got my new laptop today!
Traded my old laptop..
The devRant stickers were too difficult to remove, so I had to part with them. :(

I went home for Chrismas, I got my laptop with me but forgot its charger in my renthouse. Battery is old and it takes about 10 mins for it to run out of power.
What am I supposed to do now?

Btw Merry Christmas!

While my manager whos daily work involves docs, meetings is rocking with highly speced Laptop.

And here I am working on a really old and out of date laptop spending half of my day waiting for things to finish... 😕

TL:DR; DON'T GET INTEL+NVIDIA LAPTOP FOR LINUX.

In the same vain as Linus Torvalds: "Fuck Nvidia, and Intel".

Trying to get intel+nvidia laptop prime w/e working is a living hell.

I'm running Manjaro(arch for lazy people) with I3-gaps(larbs).

So Manjaro provides this handy script/program mhwd that supposedly would enable the non free blob Nvidia driver except it doesn't work cause it uses bumblebee and it's saying it can't find the clearly installed fucking Nvidia driver.

Bashing my head against a wall is more fucking productive then getting my cum stain of laptop to work properly.

"Just disable the intel graphics in bios"
I would except my old shitty Acer bios piece of fucking crap can't even after booting Windows for usb hdd and flashing BIOS.

GUESS WHAT LINUX COMMUNITY THAT'S WHY NOBODY WANTS TO FREAKING USE LINUX FOR GAMING.

I fucking love Linux but I gave up gaming for it.

I'll start joining red team from now on instead of trying to use your broken shit.

Going on a school camp where all the students in the school go.
2 nights and 3 days, planning to bring my laptop and my phone to make games there. (poor 15yo)

Any ideas not to be seen to the teachers? My loyal friends wont tell it because i promised to bring some old android devices for them to play games.

Well what an adventure with this SSD...😑
my sis' laptop is from 2013-ish(?) and has/had a slow HDD in it. I wanted to speed it up, before her study, so I bought a new internal SSD (no new laptop wanted).
Created a bootable USB, exchanged the hard drives and install the OS on it. Seems easy enough...
The laptop restarts to finish its process ... laptop shuts down immediately, no warning whatsoever. 😳🤨
Start it up, loading screen, fan gets louder and louder ... instant shut down.😳🤨🤨.
Redo process, this time landing on blue-screen, error code critical process died? ... instant shut down again.🤔
Restart from old HDD, normal.😐
Retry with boot USB and reinstall SSD. Setup process copying files, meanwhile instant shut down.😳 Please don't tell me!😩 Since every part of the laptop was working, except the new inserted SSD, I thought "FUCK not a broken SSD!😣"
I had my own PC with internal SSD slot, so tried to find out, whether it would be broken...
All starting up fine??🤨🤨
Ok then? Finish the setup for the third time now ... everything up and running.😐🤷
Normal shut down, unplug, plug back onto laptop, it works. HOW?? WHY?? 😕
Why the fuck are you suddenly working? 😐🤷🤷🤷
That's some magic...

Fucking pain. Can't use my right hand anymore. Stretching it is painful. Bending it is painful. Think it's that tennis elbow, mouse elbow shit finally happening. Currently applying ice at 5am.

Seriously, I got stiff and pain on my left shoulder last few weeks. After a decade of using laptops and mouses in any posture, it is not my 8 years old laptop turning into potato only. This weak ass body is turning into a sack of pain.

Guys and girls take care of your arms and body just like your hardwares.

When I began my sandwich course in a big French company, I was dreaming about cutting edge stack, rocket computer and stuff...

I was disappointed when I came to my office with an old Windows 7 computer, coding via LANDesk to an old server with Windows Server 2008 on it, with Eclipse ... INDIGO...
I have to use Java 1.7 ...
Tomcat 7.
PRTG for monitoring...
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 ...
One screen...
Coding on a codebase where, indubitably, MVC pattern was just a weird thing in books.
No UT.
Lasagna code.

Well it really disappointed me.

Luckily, the Information Service was very open minded and gave me a laptop with Fedora, 3 screens, updated the servers, and let me update the stack, with Java 10, Angular for the front, they are okay for using Docker.

So ... even if it seems to be fucked up, there’s still hope !!

- Can you please repair my laptop?
- Ok.... -.-

What do you think, how old is it?

Windows is THE STUPIDEST FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT OS ON THE PLANET! All I wanted to do was hook up an HP Spectre laptop running Win11 to a Vizio 60 inch TV. Every time I try to do this it's a crapshoot as to whether it will work. Sometimes, it comes right up as a duplicated display. Not tonight! It flashes for a second and shows the duplicated display, and then it disconnects. EVERY tutorial says use Win + P to select the display mode and it just doesn't fucking work. I've even gone as far as editing the registry to try to make Windows forget old settings. This is BASIC functionality at the end of 2023 and Microsoft FUCKS IT UP! THIS is why I use Linux/MacOS. Because those work every time.

!rant

Just got a fresh Windows 10 install up and running on a 10 year old laptop within an hour. I'm quite impressed since I thought it's going to be a torture.

Guess what my old Windows 8.1 laptop and a Nintendo 64 have in common?

Neither have a goddamn fan or a CMOS battery!!! I shit you not, I opened up my old windows 8.1 computer from like 2012 and it did not have a fan. Instead it had a large piece of metal connected to a CPU as a heatsink. It also never had a CMOS battery since the solder pads have never been used.

Me: "I'll use my old laptop as a server to access via SSH to do my Docker Tests. I don't wanna use Keyboard and Screen. So, I'll set up Debian Server"

Also me: "Oh, full disk encryption with a preboot Login required. That's such a GOOD idea"

Introducing: Stupid me 🤗

Why would a modern laptop come with a VGA port when it also has an HDMI port? I've managed to get by without VGA for years, with better image quality too. What is the reason for this? Is VGA still so prevalent that you need a backup port just in case the projector you want to use is old school? Don't they make adapters for that?

I know this is inane, but it's literally putting me off a purchase

When you've got a lot of cool dev stickers,but you don't wanna waste them on your old laptop.

Me: Professor could you please see my code i have a doubt about it.

Professor: Wait a second.

In the mean time my HP laptop that was from 2006, and this story happen 2 years ago, overheated and shutdown. Remember that i was coding in it.

Professor: Ok let's see the code.

Me: I can't show the code now since my pc overheated and shutdown, and now i have to wait him to cooldown to turn it off.

Professor: Your laptop remember when i was a kid and we had thoose old TV where we had to wait for it to heat before we could see any image.

Well thanks HP for your old laptops that heated more than my hoven.

My own cloud service. Mainly because of privacy reasons, but also playing around with servers can be fun. Before you know it you've got your own Spotify, Netflix, Google Drive, Last Pass etc... Without sacrificing all of you data :)

Sure, at first it may be a bit expensive because you have to get a server, but you don't need a crazy server to run these things, if you've got an old pc or laptop laying around you can use that too (in that case setting up your own cloud services is practically free).

I'm usually very careful with *everything* except today, I spilled half my water bottle on my personal laptop which I was using for interview prepping and while I had no plans to buy a new computer for the time being (not by choice lol). Here's a photo of my 5 year old boy.

!! TRUE STORY !!

I Began Learning Programming At 12 years-old
with a phone.
Now , I'm 14-years old and have a Laptop !

My new home office.

I haven't posted on DevRant in a while so thought I would share my new home office set up.

My old set up was great. Dual screen standing desk, fast desktop and great monitors.

Since having a new baby a few months back, the home office is now a nursery. My only option is to sit at the kitchen table or stand in the kitchen (I prefer standing).

So here it is, my new office. Laptop on a kids toy box, fit snugly between chopping boards and tomatoes.

And hey, I don't actually mind at all, I love my family.

Just remember that when life gives you tomatoes 🍅 ...

Context: Madre recently got a new laptop to replace her old HP, but since she doesn't know much about computers, I picked it out for her. I went a little overboard on the specs because I new it was a "family laptop" and I would end up using it more than she would.

Mum: *yelps after typing on computer*
Me: "What's wrong"
Mum: "This computer is too fast!"
Me: 😐
Me: ... "What?"
Mum: "It loads things too fast"
Me: "What do you mean?"
Mum: "When I click on the apps they open almost immediately"
Me: "That's a good thing"
Mum: "No it's not, it startled me!"
Me: ...
Me: ...
Me: ...
*goes back to reading book*

Been on winter holiday for 3 days. Went to log in to my work laptop to clear out email - took me 20 minutes to remember my domain password.

Getting old sucks, kids.

Fun fact : Typing on a keyboard that's not plugged into your laptop will not work. Honestly, I should have taken today off. My toddler woke up at 1am screaming bloody murder and didn't get back to bed until 2:30. There's a construction crew hammering up my 14 year old floors to replace it with new ones. My dog is anxious as fuck with all the noise, and truthfully, I'm just staring into my screen hoping the code will write itself. This code will become production deployment logic, so it damn well better be excellent and bug-free. Not a good day to pick up this task.

Don't feed the pigeons.
A cautionary tale.
When you feed the pigeons they keep coming back. They don't stop pestering you for help, and they don't ever listen to you.
I gave my father-in-law my old laptop, and installed the latest version of Office 2016 because I'm a nice guy.
Now, every week at family dinner there's something he needs me to help him with.
Mind you, his previous computer had Windows XP and the one I gave him had Windows 7. So it was quite the texh upgrade for him.
Except one of his octagenarian siblings wrote a family recipe book, and wrote it in Word Processor. (because Old People!) Well fuck of course it has pictures, clip art, special formatting, vertical and horizontal lines. It worked fine on XP because Word Processor was supported by XP.
The following is me explaining to him over the phone why his recipe book wouldn't load into Word. I was in his house picking up 2000 rounds of ammo for my and my wife's pistols (target practice) while he was out and about.
FIL: "It's the link on the desktop. It comes up in Word on the old computer but when I tried to put it on the new computer it wouldn't work. I used a thumb drive."
Me: "Okay well I tried to..."
FIL: "I don't know why it would work in Word on one computer and not the next."
Me: "Okay, well I clicked on the link to the file on your old desktop and it opened in Word Processor, not Word."
FIL: "No it opens in Word on the old computer, but it won't open on the new one."
Me: "It opens in Word Processor on the old computer, it won't open in Word on..."
FIL: "Which computer are you sitting at? The old one is on the left." (as if I wouldn't recognize the computer I had for three years and just gave him a month ago!)
Me: "The old one."
FIL: "Okay so it should open in Word on the old computer."
Me: "It won't. It will open in..."
FIL: "I was thinking maybe it had something to do with a screen that popped up when I logged in to the new computer. Something about antivirus software?"
Me: "It will open in Word Processor on your old computer, but it isn't formatted..."
FIL: "Yeah, it's a '.-w-p-s' file so it should work in Word."
Me: "Word Processor is a different program from Word. This opens in Word Processor."
(long silence)
FIL: "So which one do I have?"
Me: "You have Word Processor on the old computer."
FIL: "So how do I get Word Processor on the new computer?"
Me: "You don't. It is defunct software, it was discontinued ten years ago. You can try to get a converter online, but there's no guarantee it'll work."
FIL: "Alright, I'll be home in a few minutes. I'll take a look then."
This was at 10pm last night, and I'd been out all day since 7:30am. He still didn't believe me that the book was written in Word Processor until I showed him the different startup screen for Word Processor, where it says "Word Processor" plain as day.
I fed the pigeon. And it looks like there's more of this to come.

Haha Found this 15 year old product to clean my laptop

Still strong

My laptop has its own life...
I arrived at the lecture, start the laptop, black screen... Alrighty, might be the update from yesterday, I will just revert to the old version. Nothing... After multiple reboots and troubleshooting, I put my laptop down and go the old way of sitting down notes.

Then I come home after university and I'm set on fixing my laptop. I start it, it works perfectly fine...

I'm not even sure what fixed it..

Still new to dev, so I'm only used to windows but I want to try Linux. Don't want chance messing up my expensive pc, so instead, installing on old laptop I've been keeping in the closet. Installing Ubuntu Gnome, looked like a safe choice for beginner. This way I can try it out without consequence and possibly get new life out of an old machine.
Incidentally, any Linux specific apps/programs you'd recommend to a newbie?

When Microsoft shuttered Windows XP, my mom's old laptop became a virus-prone, sluggish machine. She let me have it, soon after which I decided to install Ubuntu on it. One thing I should note about this laptop is that the battery could not hold a charge. The power cord was the laptop's life support, and I made sure to place the power brick on a flat surface.
One day, a new version of Ubuntu was released. I decided to perform a dist-upgrade. Because this laptop was on the older side, the ventilation left a lot to be desired by today's standards. Rather than roast my crotch, I placed my computer on the table and the power brick on a swivel chair next to me.
I was working on an assignment for a class when I saw movement in my peripheral vision. I turned and watched in horror as my power brick fell off the chair, pulling the charging cord out of the laptop and turning off the laptop... MID-UPGRADE!
Moral of the story, learn to navigate a computer via a text interface if you haven't already. It may save your ass someday. It saved mine.

I just set up my 8 year old nephews new (very old) laptop with elementary OS. Took the chance to explain a bit about operating systems and how computers and programs are made and how they work. He is very interested. I'm excited to have a new apprentice!

> attempt to change password on laptop
> try sudoing to test if it changed
> it hasn't
> assume i was ssh'd into my server
> try the password, along with like 10 other permutations of it
> get ip-banned from ssh to my server :/
> try an online ssh client
> use old password
> it works!
> so what did i change?

Both my laptops are overheating, Codeblocks keeps crashing, and I'm too emotional over the latest Samurai Jack.

Okay so my brother in law has a laptop that is... To put it mildly, chockful of viruses of all sort, as it's an old machine still running w7 while still being online and an av about 7 years out of date.

So my bro in law (let's just call him my bro) asked me to install an adblock.

As I launched chrome and went to install it, how ever, the addon page said something like "Cannot install, chrome is managed by your company" - wtf?

Also, the out of date AV couldn't even be updated as its main service just wouldn't start.

Okay, something fishy going on... Uninstalled the old av, downloaded malware bytes and went to scan the whole pc.

Before I went to bed, it'd already found >150 detections. Though as the computer is so old, the progress was slow.

Thinking it would have enough time over night, I went to bed... Only to find out the next morning... It BSoD'd over night, and so none of the finds were removed.

Uuugh! Okay, so... Scanning out of a live booted linux it is I thought! Little did I know how much it'd infuriate me!

Looking through google, I found several live rescue images from popular AV brands. But:
1 - Kaspersky Sys Rescue -- Doesn't even support non-EFI systems

2 - Eset SysRescue -- Doesn't mount the system drive, terminal emulator is X64 while the CPU of the laptop is X86 meaning I cannot run that. Doesn't provide any info on username and passwords, had to dig around the image from the laptop I used to burn it to the USB drive to find the user was, in fact, called eset and had an empty password. Root had pass set but not in the image shadow file, so no idea really. Couldn't sudo as the eset user, except for the terminal emulator, which crashes thanks to the architecture mismatch.
3 - avast - live usb / cd cannot be downloaded from web, has to be installed through avast, which I really didn't want to install on my laptop just to make a rescue flash drive
4 - comodo - didn't even boot due to architecture mismatch

Fuck it! Sick and tired of this, I'm downloading Debian with XFCE. Switched to a tty1 after kernel loads, killed lightdm and Xserver to minimize usb drive reads, downloaded clamav (which got stuck on man-db update. After 20 minutes... I just killed it from a second tty, and the install finished successfully)

A definitions update, short manual skimover, and finally, got scanning!

Only... It's taking forever and not printing anything. Stracing the clamscan command showed it was... Loading the virus definitions lol... Okay, it's doing its thing, I can finally go have dinner

Man I didn't know x86 support got so weak in the couple years I haven't used Linux on a laptop lol.

Got a new laptop, but it was not properly working, so while waiting for it to get replaced, I have to use the old one again.

Feels like the CPU is a freaking potato!

Not my week for tech.

5 year old 21" desktop monitor burns out. 2nd monitor, so at least not completely down.

Then my toddler reached for my root beer and spills it on my 1 month old laptop. I quickly pull the plug and turn upside down, get it wiped off and pray. Next day, arrow and enter keys a little sticky and battery is blown. The 2 exact fucking reasons I bought the new laptop. (keyboard issues and battery)

Keep em coming tech gods.

So I am back home for a week without my laptop and my phone was low on power so I finally give up and decide to use a old PC we had.

I was gonna download some anime which I did but as I was waiting I started just looking around...

1. The drives are huge, 3 HDs with 400GB each.... vs my current 128 GB SSD

2. I found an old stash of anime (2013-4), several series... that I had actually not watched

3. The machine is known to be slow but after using it for awhile to install VLC and JDowloader... It's actually OK...

4. Video can playback at 3x speed... No lag... Apparently I forgot the onboard GPU failed and my dad replaced it with a cheap (I think) GFX card that has like 1GB RAM/processing power...

10 minutes in and I’m in love... my 8 year old windows laptop which was at this point so agonizingly slow it was barely usable, is now lightning fast

I REALLY wanna install Linux on my main lappy but I’m too skittish about losing my music production stuff

So I had to give my old laptop to my cousin who is in 9th standard for his online exams and classes .
(Just for context : I had installed manjaro on that old machine)
When I heard from my mother that his parents are coming to my house to borrow it from me I had to install windows because my cousin is not into tech that much and he barely could use windows 7 . ( The old laptop was shut down for a month or so) When I tried to install windows 10 . Machine started making beep beep noises . And I couldn't Install the windows because I had 30minitues to install a good os that my cousin could use . But guess what the Bastard windows , didn't get installed . I then installed manjaro and guided him the basics of how to navigate .
I hope he'll like it.
Again proved : Windows Sucks like hell.

IPMI...

2010....

Java Web...

Oracle JDK needed....

Oracle JDK Download requires Oracle Account..... To circumvent as I don't want a motherfugging shitty oracle account tons of googling and loading shit from not so trustful pages.

TLS 1.0 and WebJDK require Internet Explorer.....

And an even older version of Oracle JDK 8....

Broken keyboard input....

As on Laptop for Windows / Internet Explorer additionally struggling with keyboard...

Mounting SMB Share requires password change, as my password contains invalid characters....

Finally getting shit to load GParted...

Taking fucking ages to load.

Broken keyboard input, no pasting.....

Chrooting / input becomes a 15 min exercise.

Actual input necessary on chroot: 1 command.

Actual time needed to get there : 2 1/2 h.

*sigh*

When that one old machine dies noone was aware of. And this one old machine is only accessible via an IPMI... As noone even knows where that machine is.

Weekend dead. Weekend is so fucking dead and overrated.

I was inspired to be a programmer when I was 7 yrs old.
I started out using my dad's old Macintosh, it was pretty good at the time when I was 7. I played a game called "On The Run" at miniclip. I thought that one day I want to become a programmer who can do more than this or any other game.
Later when I was 9, my father bought a laptop but then he gave it to me. So I started and learn how computers work. It was a Acer 4376G I think, Windows Vista. (I didnt know vista was bad) I started with how to mod Java on a game called Need for Madness. That was when I learned about all sorts of jargon when looking up stuffs. I was able to somehow understand code but not write it. It was 9 years later, when at the end of 2015, I found khan academy and codecademy thru howtogeek. That was when I understand the most basic function that led me to build my entire knowledge or else I can only write

New stickers on my laptop. Started a new collection since the others are on my old laptop

DataDevNerd (ofc down to hardware bits)
Briefly blending amoung holiday tech consumers at Micro Center waiting for key-holder assistance @SSDs.

Rando: "they finally have a sale on *X, rebranded, price++* for my *ref'd only by part names* setup! What are you getting?"

Me: "replacement SSD, laptop's finally failing"

Rando: "Yeah, I totally get you, I hate that. How old is it? Hopefully you got a couple years outta it?"

Me: "over 7yrs old."
Rando: "Wow! Mustve not used it too much, still that's pretty long."

Me: "Actually, it's been my primary device, heavily used, as I'm a dev. I just know what/when to use SSD vs the HDD."

Rando: "Duuude, that's awesome!...wait...why haven't you just bought a new laptop yet?"

Me: "I'm not for hardware abuse or burning money"

I was quickly reminded why I tend to avoid typical consumer tech stores.

I'm thinking of buying a new laptop. But I'm sad about leaving all of these stickers (yeah I know they're pretty random)

also, should I get a macbook or not? I really like the OS but I hate it's pricetag. But i heard Apple supports their products for more than 5 years and this laptop of mine is just 3 and a half years old and it's slowing down already even on 16gb memory. IntelliJ used to run smoothly on this.

Can u guys suggest a developer friendly laptop? im not really into gaming so I wouldn't need gaming one 👨‍💻

I really love my mother but.

A couple of weeks ago she asked me for advice regarding a laptop. She wanted something cheap for office and stuff.
Since I know her I exactly knows she needs extreme fast boot and responsiveness. She'll go all hulk rage if the laptop doesn't boot in less than 30 seconds.

Told her to get something with ssd since storage is no issue and 4gb ram with an decent older I5. Took a whole day going through stores in my area and online to find good deals. Send her everything I found. Really good laptop for under 500€ I would've killed for.

Fast forward. She bought some 300€ shit laptop because it had 1tb memory. She didn't ask for advice just bought the cheapest that would read decently description wise.

Now she is raging all day and bitching about it being so slow and I should fix it for her since I'm an it guy etc.

Looking at the specs I nearly started to vomit. She seriously bought a laptop worse than she already had. Old i3 2gb ram 5200rpm HDD.

I told her she should return it because it is shit. But no. She insists that since it's newer it is better and I am only a lazy fuck who doesn't want to be bothered to do her a favor.

Offered the best thing I could think of. Told her I'd install Linux on it for her and teach her how to use it.
Explained it would run more smoothly since she refused to take that shit laptop back. But no. Of course she insists on using windows 10....

FUUUUUUUCK. I love my mother but seriously I'm about to explode.

I need to buy a laptop to replace my 5 year old one. My work is mostly in data science. My budget is really flexible. Any suggestions?

>Client: Hey, I lost my Facebook password but it's saved on my old laptop
>Me: ...alright, i'll look
>Laptop: won't boot - "No bootable devices found!"
hoo boy
>opens 'er up to pull drive
this is really heavy for an SSD, Corsair, and especially for only 64GB
>plugs into other PC
nothing
fuck me
>sees jumper pins
>jumps them
>BAREFOOT-ROM RECOVERYMODE SSD DEVICE - 128GB
that's twice the size of the disk, wtf?
but ok, i'll take it, any data?
>Win10: *crashes because driver chokes*
>Win7: *crashes because driver chokes*
>WinXP: *doesn't see it, TestDisk doesn't run because Kernel32.DLL issue*
>Linux: *Issues the instant SSD plugged in, they stop instant removed*
fuck it
RMA

Forgot to bring me laptop to college, so had to use the age old Turbo C complier on college PC. So had to do some power calculation.. used the pow() function, forgot to include math.h...
And bamm!!! It compiled and I had no idea why the pow function isn't giving the correct value!!

Lesson learnt: never trust anything!!

I feel like distro-hopping again.

I was thinking of trying Gentoo (Arch is too mainstream, meh), but I came across an article on FreeBSD and realized that I'd never tried a BSD.

Any of you use BSD as a desktop OS? If so, which one? The laptop I'll be running it on is about four years old now, and there's no nVuDiA shit there, so hardware compatibility shouldn't be an issue.

I miss my old laptop. Got a new MacBook Pro recently, and its so expensive I don't feel like sticking anything on its lid..

My 1300€ Thinkpad is just a noisy and sometimes annoying laptop. It is sometimes so loud that my colleague is pissed off.

It is almost four years old and dust cleaning did not help...
I am so pissed off by this behaviour i am actually thinking of selling it and buying a macbook.......

Just realised I've been looking for an x86 based laptop to install Linux on just for around the house...

Been looking at buying a brand new one and only now just remembered I have an old 2009 MBP...

Let's break out the elementary OS USB and breathe some life in this baby!

I used to work in a Tech Support department where everybody was constantly pranking each other.

In one of the iterations of such events one of the guys actually forked the source of a login page, in one instance of the app that was running in a VM, and edited the code so it would redirect the user to a lemon party'ish website.

It was quite an upgrade to the old M.O. where people would just email themselves messages with seemingly bureaucratic call to actions containing hyperlinks to the same lemon party'ish websites.

And the most direct approach, which is to type those directly into one's browser if the laptop is left unattended & unlocked due to a trip to the toilet.

So I'm toying around with an old Pentium M laptop I used to use back in 2013-2015,and it's surprisingly more useable than I thought it would be,but I swear I don't remember the internet relying so heavily on JavaScript.

After hassling and saying all the benefits of Linux finally we agreed that she'd give Linux a go on her old laptop and after all the set ups she changes the background picture to windows xp's landscape just to feel good. Change never comes with some people.

When youre about to go on a 1 week vacation and you start to move all your projects to your FTP server as if theres no tomorrow, just in case you need them on your old ass laptop youre bringing.
Also bringing books. Some small, some thicc

I have just realised this. I have my laptop for over a year now and I haven't changed my Desktop wallpaper for both installations of Windows & Ubuntu.

I am officially old (and lame probably).

This moment when your internet provider kills your VDSL for four months and offers you a 5GB LTE SIM as a replacement...

Not that I burn through hundreds of gigabytes a month or so...
Gosh sometimes I hate ISPs.

Apparently we quit our contract (we didn't) but they just internally fucked up and nobody could tell us what happened. Finally after directly contacting their management we got service back...

But hey an old laptop at the open window relaying all traffic through the barely receivable WiFi of our generous neighbors at least made devRant available :'D

People keep asking me the reason why I am still using my 9 years old laptop which has Pentium b940 and 4 GB of ram. I should say Its enough for me!
All hard work is on the server side. I just need an SSH client, VS Code, Chromium, and Spotify, all running on a light weight Ubuntu. why should I buy one of those brand new laptops which has lights more than a UFO.

I'm thinking of self hosting all my small web projects,

I have this old laptop running ubuntu server heedlessly I used to store and stream pirated movies, after multiple embarrassing moments with free backend/platform as a service options and not finding a cheap VPS, this seems like the way to go. I don't get much traffic on these sites i just want them to be available when i need to present them.

then there's tons of other features that are locked behind a paywall,

I once had to store images in the database because heroku wont accept file uploads and the project hadn't been paid, in short, I was dead broke

Was working on Windows 10 laptop with SSD.
Put to sleep mode n went for lunch.
Came back, switched on, blue screen.
Restarted, can not boot.
Opened back panel, removed ssd, connected to other machine with cable, did not detect. Shit, my 1tb SSD is gone.
Took out old rusty 128gb SSD, reformatted it.
Downloaded windows 10 bootloader on USB n reinstalled windows.
From my backed up choco script, reinstalled all apps.
Back to work.

Opinions on the current gen iPad mini/air (apart from "reeeee Apple")? iPad 4 was a brilliant device, loved it, looking for a similar thing. Can't find any decent Android tablet and honestly, not sure if I want Android at all.

I basically want a companion device with superb battery life, a larger screen than my phone, and good and useful apps (used Garageband, Magellan, and Voice Synth quite a bit on the old iPad). Will be going to college in a few months so something useful for carrying around too that's more portable than my laptop.

Considered a Celeron laptop, but it's basically useless for anything but text editing and basic browsing.

So, started working in a nodejs/react personal project with an old friend. I code in linux mint, my pal always at windows 7 never worked in something different from php. From the very beginning I advised him to move to linux

Me: hey man, the backend is running now, pull the changes and `npm start`

Friend: ok so I need to install dependencies right?
Me: yup, easy peasy lemon squeezy

So after a brief(one week period) until my friend could install visual studio to get some deps installed

Friend: hey I ran `npm start`, it got stuck. backend does not start at all, no output messages, no error, no nothing

Me: FFS, that's why I told you from the start, "use any linux distro for this project" :(

Then for a couple of hours(4) trying to install a distro in his 7 years old laptop...

Me: Ok, let's call it a day, 7 tries to install this thing in your old machine is enough. did you not realize your HDD was really busted? in your 7 years with your laptop? this is BS that's why I could not install linux :|

Friend: I didn't, windows never showed me any problem, maybe windows is better than linux in that matter.

Me: GTFO

It could just be me, but I feel lime I have an extreme lack of money to pursue projects. I know java really well, but I want to develop android apps. That's fine until you consider the fact that the only computers I have available to me at my house are very old. A gradle build in android studio on my PC takes <10min. So I just really need a better computer which means I need money which means I need a job which is unlikely because not many people hire 15 year olds. In fact, my parents bought a laptop last year for me to use, but my older sister fried the video out component on the motherboard so it needs a new one which is ~$300

Father bought a computer for the family in 2011. A HCl Dual Core Pentium 4 machine with 21" TFT screen. I was allowed to use it only under someone's presence for at-most 20 minutes each day for the next 6-9 months.

After that we got a network card (plug-and-play internet dongle) for the internet services. That's when I entered the world of internet and made a Facebook account. I was 12 then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

After two years or so, we're playing games on it, watching movies and using MS Word for school related stuff. Then my brother entered college, and used it for stuff like coding and image processing on Matlab, while I watched him doing so and getting yelled at for doing what I liked to do, at the same time.

After 5 years or so, I got a personal laptop with decent configuration for college work. The old computer still worked like charm.

Now, the old monk is at rest with old memories, unknown files and lot of bollywood songs.

I just noticed a five hour old mail on my work laptop. The notification was BEHIND all windows!

Im gonna get a new laptop soon and on my old laptop I want to install linux (cant do that on my main laptop because Im a windows dev at the moment).

I am not new to linux and have used 3 major ubuntu versions and it was all trouble, autoremoving files after update etc.
So I am planning to go Manjaro but which desktop environment shall I use? I've heard great things about i3 and Cinnamon. Gnome is not something I liked in Ubuntu.

Which desktop environment do you use, why and how did you make the choice?

Installed i3 on my old laptop and he don't want to open nothing... T.T

My older brother introduced me to linux and android custom roms when I was like 11. So I flashed my old sony Ericson phone with custom roms from xda and tried Ubuntu live CDs on my mother's old 40gb hdd laptop.
But my introduction to programming was when I saw some videos about the raspberry pi on YouTube.
I was like 14 and programmed basic scripts for my raspberry pi in nano over putty or notepad++.
At first I didn't even knew to intendent but in the process of my first project (Python sunrise alarm clock with tts) I learned many valuable things about Python and Linux/Debian.
The years after that I learned more with my now multiple RaspberryPIs, Arduinos and other hardware.
So in conclusion RaspberryPIs, the diy/open source community and especially my brother introduced me to programming.
I am now doing bigger projects with my brother and have (really basic) knowledge of java,Javascript,php,html,Arduino/C++ and Python.

Just installed arch on my laptop...

I've always been a Debian guy before so blimey that install was painful but I'm glad I've done it.
I then installed sddm, for some reason it seems to be an old version maybe? I was expecting the look of sddm you get in kubuntu, any ideas?

Well it's official...

I've only got Linux on my computers... except one old laptop that I have win7 on that is just perfectly setup and doesn't connect to the internet anymore because it's just a storage dump/ game emulator rig...

Win10 frustrated me for the last time and I don't miss it one bit.

About a month ago I sorted out some old electronic stuff and found my old laptop from 2011. A 2:nd Gen i7 8gb ram. I replaced it due to several bluescreens a day that later turned out to be caused by a faulty RAM module (was 16Gb back then).
Well, back then it became a backup laptop and went on the shelf and almost forgotten.

I went through all the old files on it and copied them to the NAS, replaced the mechanic drive with cheep SSD.
Used the old Win7 license key to upgrade to win 10 , dust off the fan, and it turned out to be usable.

I have much better computers so I would not use it for anything but today I gave it to my 6 year old nephew so he can start using a computer and build his knowledge. Worse case; If he spills soda on it he'll learn not to do that with the more expensive computers he will use in future.
So win win. I got to get rid of some junk that had been gathering dust for many years by giving my nephew an opportunity to get started with computers.

Finally, the timing: Microsoft announced a few days back that any new upgrade from windows 7&8 to 10 is no longer supported, but that computer still has a valid win 10 license as it was updated a month ago.

Nothing like having your hands full with work projects, then getting a message from your, not so technically knowledgeable, dad, which says that he's going to remove linux from your old laptop and replace it woth windows.

By himself.....

Tried talking him out of it, but je's adamant about it.

Should I call an ambulance?

I also feel really bad for my old laptop now

My personal laptop suddenly broke.

Clearly, something in the motherboard got broken, because no LED is working, long press for hard reset is not working: only fans are on when I power on the button. To disconnect I should remove the battery.

It's an old (and very loved by me) laptop, but I explained it in the repair shop, and they told me they "will do all possible to repair it" by a reasonable price, so worth it.

After some days the call me to tell me that, after some tests like a display test or ram test, the problem is probably in the motherboard and they don't have the tools to fix that.
They can bring the laptop to another specialized shop for, of course, a much more expensive price.

How should I react? I'm very angry. When you told me you could "do all possible to repair it" after I told you where the problem probably is, it implies you have the tools, at least, to find out if the problem were there.

When we talk I said "yes, I accept I'll pay that price if you aren't able to fix it".
Being coherent, are you expecting to me to have the tools to pay you in that case?

I'm so tired of the impunity of companies for treating customers as if they had no idea about technology always even if in the most of cases is it. (My laptop was not apple)

What a waste of time and money.

Replaced all the aliases with fork bombs in my colleague's laptop when he left it unlocked and unattended last Friday.

Hope to hear about the casualties next Monday.

Good old fork bomb

Professional Home File Server Setup.

Using an old laptop and drive I made this. But I had nowhere to store. I have to use Team Viewer to even access it now for maintenance.

The past couple of weeks I've been struggling with my laptop. It regularly ran out of memory and when that happens everything runs in a snail pace. I always thought 8GB would be enough for developing software, but I was terribly wrong.

So I ordered another 8GB and installed it yesterday. Later at work I looked at the ram usage and noticed that it was up to nearly 13GB!
I have no idea how I managed to get by with only 8 for so long. 🤔

FYI: I usually have 2 to 3 IDEs and a gazillion chrome tabs open 😅

Been working in market research for the past year and a half while doing a part time masters in business.

I officially quit in a week and will be a full time student and reviving my dormant programming skills.

Gone are the days of colleagues asking why their pirated Microsoft office crashes on then 8 year old laptop. No longer will I be subjected to attending client meetings where my sole purpose is to ensure the projector is working as I am "good with that sorta thing".

Friday evening, I am free!!

Two years ago my laptop crashed and wouldn't boot windows anymore. Luckily I had already handed in all small projects and backed up the rest. However, I still had to install all my programs on a fresh new windows installation.

I decided to give Linux a try since it was an old laptop and I have to say that my data loss situation was not bad at all but getting into solving Linux errors can take quite some time out of your day, especially in the beginning. After a week of spending time here and there to improve the situation I had pretty much everything setup to the point where I could start development again. I have to say that it has changed my workflow and that I'm loving Linux now. I started out with Ubuntu and now I'm trying out some other distros on my second laptop (if you got any suggestions please let me know).

I still use windows side by side with Linux for certain tasks, but I'm not regretting losing my windows installation on my laptop. It made me realize that there's much more out there to learn and to give a try.