RonB
unread,Mar 3, 2020, 4:42:58 AM3/3/20You do not have permission to delete messages in this group
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Sometimes you should just leave well enough alone. I've mentioned my
"fabulous" Latitude D430 running Linux Mint Mate 19.3 in past posts. Well,
like an idiot, I decided to update the BIOS from A07 to the "newest" A09,
and immediately the D430 started lagging. I thought it was just my
imagination, but it turned out it wasn't. Downgrading to A08 restored my
performance (might even made it better than A07). So, sometimes, the newest
isn't the best. Happy to have the *fabulous* back in my fabulous Latitude
D430.
Meanwhile I've been applying the Linux Mint treatment to the D430's kin, a
couple D630s (because, being greedy, I wanted 4 GBs of RAM instead of 2).
The first one from Shop Goodwill came with a hard drive, 3 GBs of RAM (which
worked well, full screen streaming, etc.) and a good battery (even a power
supply, all for $17 plus shipping). I just installed Linux Mint Mate on that
one and handed it off to a niece who needed a laptop. She loves it.
But I wanted to try one of these for myself (I like the build quality), so I
watched Shop Goodwill and found one for $20 "even" (which included shipping
— well, actually, it was $19.99 with $.01 shipping — they do that on Shop
Goodwill). That one was ordered on Friday and arrived on Monday. Hard drive
gone, but the caddy was there. Battery so dead that I thought the power jack
was broken, but tested it on the other D630's battery, and it charged fine —
so it was *that* close to being broken up for parts. Now I've got a 60 GB
SSD (Kingston, SSDNow), a new battery and another 2 GB RAM chip coming —
altogether, a $37 investment so, so much for "dumpster diving." :) This one
should outperform my desktop. I'll let you know how fantastic it is, after
the parts come in and I've installed Linux Mint Mate 19.3 (or maybe I'll try
LMDE 4 and bypass Ubuntu... probably not, I'm used to what I'm used to). I
have tested this one with a Live Linux Mint USB and it seems to work fine.
(I'm also probably going to get a Dell "media" caddy (second hard drive
module) that holds a 2.5" IDE PATA hard drive that can be hot swapped with
the DVD/CD-ROM module. I figure I'll find a "huge" 250 GB or so IDE hard
drive for backup and storage.)
One thing that is odd about the D630s (both of them), I have to do the
initial boot in "compatibility mode," they lock otherwise. Once I did that
with the other D630 (the one I gave away) Linux Mint installed to the hard
drive without any further issues. I'm guessing it will be the same with the
new D630 but, if not, I'll let you know. So, trolls, all is not perfect in
Linux Land. (Some consolation for you.)
Sorry about the "off-topic," non-"Snit" post. I just couldn't help myself.
--
The fabulous Latitude D430, running
Linux Mint Mate 19.3 on 2GBs of RAM