[GTALUG] More pointless battles [was: I'm discarding an old notebook!]

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

I've been shamed / intrigued into doing a bit more hacking on this 
Acer Aspire 9300 notebook.

Spoiler: this was a waste of time.

A little over 5 years ago I had replaced the HDD with an SSD and put a 
then-current Fedora (24?) on it (no Windows).  It was unreliable (for 
reasons I have previously explained).

Now I've dragged out the old HDD and copied the Vista and Ubuntu 12.04 
installation from it to the SSD.  (Byte-for-byte, so the partition 
alignments are highly questionable.)

MS Vista boots.  It doesn't know how to update itself (End of Life).

Ubuntu 12.04 boots.  It doesn't know how to update itself either since it 
is no longer supported.  I fix that (somewhat) by hacking on 
/etc/apt/sources.list, replacing ca.archive.ubuntu.com with 
old-releases.ubuntu.com.  The newest update there was probably two years 
ago, but that's better than more than 5 years ago.

While doing Ubuntu updates, the machine crashed a couple of times.
Probably because it is using the nouveau video driver.  I wonder if I
can enable the ancient no-longer supported proprietary driver at this late 
date?  Even if I can, apparently that path dies after Ubuntu 14.04 so it 
isn't really a solution.

Back on Windows Vista, I tried updating Firefox.  A very slow process, but 
it seemed to complete (but not to the current version; possibly because 
Vista is no longer supported).  I ran Firefox's update again and got a 
blue screen (OS crash, not Firefox crash).

At this point, I saw very little upside and had wasted a lot of time 
getting this far.  I cannot run current Windows 10 or current Linux. So 
I've given up.  I've stripped the SSD, the RAM, the WiFi card, and the DVD 
drive.

================

Now I'm wasting time updating the three OSes on my Acer Aspire One 522, a 
netbook from 2011 (Fedora, Ubuntu, Win10). 
<https://www.notebookcheck.net/Acer-Aspire-One-522.46975.0.html>
This is a very meagre machine: slow even in its day.  But it does run 
current systems.

When I got it, I upgraded the RAM from 1G to 4G.  Win 7 Starter was 
crippled to use at most 2G (silly Microsoft market segregation games).  
The screen had too little resolution to install Win 8, but full Win 10 
Home is happy (a free upgrade; it will use all 4G).

The netbook still has its original HDD.  Win 10 and Gnome both crawl 
unless they live on SSDs.  I intend to replace the HDD with the SSD from 
the scrapped notebook.

Just a few years separate the Acer Aspire 9300 and the Acer Aspire One 
522.  Yet the newer one is more usable now.  Still, the newer one is 
missing some modern conveniences: UEFI firmware and USB 3.x.

There is a significant difference between a 17" notebook and a 10.6" 
netbook.