[sf-lug] Today's meeting Sunday 2 March 2014 -- hot rodding an old laptop

[jim]

     Ken's got a DVD caddy.
     He removed the spinning drive from his old,
old laptop and put it in this $8.00 DVD caddy.
     He installed an SSD drive in the old, old
laptop's hard drive slot.
     He removed the CD (or DVD) device from his
laptop and installed the DVD caddy (with his
laptop's spinning drive) into the DVD slot.
     Now his old, old laptop boots as fast as his
other, new laptop. However, to boot he's got to
catch the BIOS (before it starts loading the
default OS) and pick the internal SSD drive
from the BIOS boot menu: otherwise BIOS will
boot from the spinning drive in the DVD caddy.

     It's weird that BIOS prefers booting from
the DVD device rather than from the SSD that's
connected to the internal controller. How does
BIOS see past the motherboard controllers to
recognize the data on the storage devices?




On 03/02/2014 04:50 PM, Bobbie Sellers wrote:
> Hi LUGgers,
>
>         10:35 A.M. I arrived followed shortly John Strazziano,
> then Ken Shaeffer and wife,  Maestro, Yong, Jason, Mickey,
> Daniel, Jim, Mikki,  Bob and Eric  finally.
>
>     John had a couple of laptop computers he was trying to dispose
> of but he kept one.
>     We tried several distributions on those.
>
>      Daniel wanted to install Fedora but it would not give good
> results on the Dell machine so finally PC LOS in 32 bit version worked 
> fine and he will install it when he has some time.
> This could boot 64 bit versions of some systems but not the
> ones we wanted to use originally.
>
>     Ken was just helping everyone but especially
> Yong and Mickie.
>
>     Maestro wanted a 32 bit version of Fedora 20 and after some
> experimentation yesterday I bought along the Jam spins which
> seemed more adaptable.  Then he spent a lot of time working with
> Mikki finding drivers on line for it using my Compaq.  I was running
> back and forth trying to help Daniel with the new install then
> showing him a few details of the KDE Plasma desktop environment.
>
>     We had an accident in that one member knocked over
> another's decaf soy latte but the damage was soon repaired
> and if the proper cap had been kept on the cup the spill might
> not have been as disastrous.  A fresh decaf, et al and we were
> good to go.
>
>     Jason had a friend's laptop computer on which Windows
> was to be deprecated totally and then with a magazine disk,
> which I supplied, he installed Mint!  It was a fine light machine
> with excellent response.
>     Jason also has some 3 GiB external drives he wishes to sell or 
> trade for other equipment.  He has lots of 8 GiB SD and Micro SD cards 
> as well for similar trade or sale.
>
>     Mikki McGee was having a problem with the WiFi on her ASUS Eee  
> PC.   Maestro, Jim and Ken all worked on it
>
>     Jim was showing off his new Zareason machine which he has made 
> some changes to lately as he mentions in his own post.
>
>     We were having a lot of fun until about 1:30 PM when we broke
> up and the last members of the group packed up their gear. Jim brought 
> his car around and with as many people as we could cram
> in stopped first at the FrankenArt studio where hot dogs were had
> by at least 3 of the riders.  Jim dropped off Jason near Post and
> Hyde then dropped me a couple of blocks along.
>
>     If anyone is interested next meeting will be the 17th of this
> month and I will have at least Kali-linux on hand.  I am planning
> on getting Kubuntu which is KDE running over the Ubuntu system
> instead of Unity.  More information about those ISOs will be
> posted with the next meeting announcement.
>     I must say that without the assistance of John in helping
> set up a 3 table area for us it would have been much harder
> to get 11 members together.  The Cafe Enchante was extremely
> crowded and busy today.
>
>     If I left anything out of these notes about the meeting please
> inform me or the LUG asap.
>
>     Thanks for your attention!
>
>     Bobbie Sellers
>
>
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