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The first thing to do after breakfast is to start the laptop, to see if the world still exists.  You can never know these days, as most of its population seems to have gone completely crazy.  I normally like to take a rest from the fatigue of a quick breakfast, and efficiently use the occasion for an information session on the net.

Last Monday morning that turned out to be impossible. My (very) old ASUS laptop had decided to go on strike. It showed a short screen blink and refused to boot. I tried to force it into its BIOS, but neither F2 nor ESC worked. I decided it was dead.  Pity I had bought it a brand new battery for Christmas.

First thing to do was to remove the battery and the hard drive. You cannot throw away the hardware with the battery, and you should NEVER throw a computer away containing a hard disk containing all your passwords and information, even if it is encrypted… I have been thinking about also keeping the laptop screen, but decided this was an excellent opportunity to get rid of this modern shaving mirror.

The new laptop came with a nice non-glare screen, 256 GB SSD, USB3 ports and Windows 10. I also bought a USB3-compatible 2,5 inch housing for the old hard disk.

As I did not own a machine with a Windows 10 operating system yet I decided to keep it instead of cleaning the disk and installing Linux. I need at least 1 copy of windows to support and maintain those pieces of equipment which do not have proper LINUX support because their Manufacturers surrendered to Micro$oft and are now constantly trying to catch up with their support software… TomTom is a good example for this (“To update your product, try to borrow a windows computer from a friend or relative”)…

The first run of windows 10 was a revelation… it took 3.5 hours before I could use it, it kept updating… updating… updating… After a reboot it said: ”do not switch off your computer, your windows is updating…”. After that I was able to use Windows 10 for the first time, and it felt like I had ended up in 1979. This is not exactly the software that is going to make me happy!

It took 10 minutes to put Lubuntu 16.04.2 LTS onto the machine using one of my“Linux-on-the-go” USB sticks, including moving all data from the old hard disk to the SSD…

I can now use the new windows OS to test my new USB Linux image on a windoze 10 OS.

But that’s another story…