Ever Loving Royal PITA

[jronald]

What an ever loving Pain In The Ash!
Long story short, my mom needs a laptop to replace the one she gave up in retiring from the company she was with. So scrounging thru the junk I came up with enough "just" ok pieces to cobble together a T30. Mind you I started 150 odd pieces and in about 1 hour was able to boot into the bios. Another 45 minutes and a full bottle of CA and everything will now stay together.

Then I started to put Windblows XP on the system. I started at 10am Eastern. Its now 7pm, and it is more or less "current" (I think).

I spoke too soon, it just popped up wanting to add 34 more updates, this is after SP3 has been installed.

What a joke for an OS.

Ron

[Harryc]

Seems to me that you deal with enough T30's where you'd have learned long ago to keep an image of a fully updated XP install around ...

[Neil]

But, what other 10 year old OS can you even get updates for, at all? But, yeah, it is a pain and takes considerable time to install and update, then find drivers, etc., etc.

[jronald]

Mummy dearest does not know it, but she came reeeeaaaal close to getting uBuntu and Open Office.

You do have a point about a clone-able drive, I do like to match the COA although. That said it should be no more problem than what Im doing anyway.


Ron

[ThinkRob]

But, what other 10 year old OS can you even get updates for, at all? But, yeah, it is a pain and takes considerable time to install and update, then find drivers, etc., etc.

RHEL? Well... updates for up to 10 years.

I've found Debian to be stellar in this regard. You can upgrade from major version to major version just fine, and since you're not forced to use a specific UI setup, you can pick something that's light enough to work on a machine of any age.

It's amazing how quickly you can stop fearing major upgrades when they're Free.

[Majestic]

You do have a point about a clone-able drive, I do like to match the COA although. That said it should be no more problem than what Im doing anyway.

Ron

An alternative is to clone the hard drive from an image and then use a program like Win Key Finder to change the key over to the one listed on the COA.

[jronald]

Not the program I use, but I do change them over to the sticker on the machine when I can. Otherwise its the VLK and off we go.

Ron

[Norway Pad]

For my latest XP install, I used a XP SP3 install disc that I managed to get a hold of. That saved me some time with updating, but I think it was still 94 updates. In my dreams I have a slipstreamed install disc for each series of Thinkpads, with the correct drivers and updates etc applied. but that will probably just remain a dream..

[ZAGNUT]

In my dreams I have a slipstreamed install disc for each series of Thinkpads, with the correct drivers and updates etc applied. but that will probably just remain a dream..

i have some of those but they're like 3 years old and probably missing a few thousand "critical" hot fixes...who cares though, auto updates is turned off by default, IE is purged and everything works just fine...and i wouldn't remember the whole slipstreaming process (HFslip) even if i wanted to.