Saturday 17 March 2018

And now, an old Thinkpad

My old Dell Inspiron that I've used since 2010 is finally reaching the stage where it's running out of puff, not disastrously, but getting to the stage where one would start to think about replacing it.

Of course I could just put up with it's huffing and puffing and use my MacBook Air as a day to day machine, but I'd reached the stage where a new Windows machine seemed like a necessity.

The only problem was that we'd just paid out for a trip to Borneo, and I really couldn't justify the extra money right now.

Well, I'd always half planned to buy myself an ex-lease Thinkpad for Linux work, so after a little bit of agonising I bought myself a X230 with Windows 7 professional license, reasoning that I could use it as a windows machine, and perhaps even convert it to dual boot - Windows 7 and Linux, for the simple reason that the documentation project I've volunteered for is built around windows, meaning I need One Note, and that most of the rest of my personal notes and documentation is in Evernote, which again is not available for Linux.

So I paid my two hundred and thirty bucks to one of these companies that refurbish ex-lease machines and a few days later it arrived, beautifully packed in shock absorbing packaging and with a refurbisher's test report, and nicely imaged with a clean copy of Windows 7 with an install of Open Office 3 thrown in.

Out of the box, battery life was better than my Air, which realistically manages about two hours work these days between charges. The Thinkpad claimed a realistic four hours thirty out of the box and the what's more the battery is easy to replace down the track if needs be.

So, installing things.

First off were the standard utilities that I use:

  • Focuswriter - for distraction free writing
  • Kate - for when only a text editor would do
  • Open live writer - an open source clone of windows live writer for bloggin
  • Tweeten - a desktop twitter client
  • Gnumeric - spreadsheet for data manipulation
  • Libre Office - when I need to write something and format it nicely
  • Thunderbird - for email and calendaring
  • Texts - for wysiwyg markdown editing


And then it was the data intensive things

  • Dropbox - for data sharing
  • One Drive - cloudy filestore
  • One Note - Microsoft's note management tool which has all my project documentation
  • Evernote - which basically contains my entire life, invoices, bills, research notes and so on


All in all, close to 40GB of data to download, which took around a day with a few timeouts when we wanted to watch the morning news on iView, or actually use the internet. Given that our internet and phone plan has a stupidly large cap ( a terabyte of data per 28 days - effectively it's unlimited, we usually only use around 10% of it) I wan't worried by the download size..

Also given my general interest in note taking applications I installed Standard Notes for fun, and I should probably also install the windows version of CherryTree given that I waxed lyrical about it a few months ago.

It might have been quicker, but windows also wanted to download a zillion patches (actually a little over 200) and apply them, all of which took time out of the process.

At the end of it I've a machine with reasonable battery life, a decent form factor for working on the train and these silly little tables.

I havn't installed virtual box yet, but I'm planning to do so to build a virtual machine to put together a prototype Omeka site to showcase the project so far.

Sooner of later I'll probably add a couple of extra applications - such as the Gramps family history tool.

The only Linux software I really need is tesseract and cuneiform for OCR work on pdfs from old printed documents and they'll run equally well in a Linux VM.

So, next steps.

Basically use it, and keep the old Inspiron for backing up data from documentation project.

I do face a decision down the track as to whether I keep the machine, or migrate it to linux as originally intended. If I keep the machine I probably need to think about an upgrade to Windows 10, but for the moment seven is good enough. After all it's the software base that's important, not the operating system...

[update 18/03/2018]

... and this morning I was looking up some references and discovered I'd totally forgotten to install my preferred refernce maneger - Zotero, doh!

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