A few months ago the laptop was having many amounts of dicky fits and started refusing to do what I asked it to in a sensible amount of time. The HDD was so knackered and corrupted it was just…bollocksed.
Ste managed to convince me that Linux was the way to go, so after many hours of arsing about…it was installed! A pretty easy system to use but a pain the arse to setup, especially if you have no idea on how to code anything. Me!
The biggest pain in the arse came when we tried to install some graphics drivers, and that’s when the whole thing just went tits-up, with me loosing my rag with the lappy…hitting it and subsequently breaking it. Sorry Ste. It just didn’t work out!
So the lappy’s just been sat in the office gathering dust until yesterday when I was a bit bored. I decided to start it up and see what happens. For some bizarre reason, I left the Linux DVD in the drive and the BIOS setup to boot from CD. Wierd, as I don’t remember doing that! I decided that I would try and get rid of Linux from the HDD and try to re-install XP. That would have worked nicely if the HDD was buggered, so I found the original HDD that came with the laptop and put that back in, tried to install XP…IT WORKS!
Wierdly, it seems to run a whole hell of a lot better than it did originally. I’ve figured out that because I’ve installed my own copy of XP, instead of the bloated shite that came with the machine, everything just seems to run more smoothy. Hell, I’ve even managed to install Microsoft’s Flight Simulator X and that runs reasonably, with only 512mb of RAM and next to no graphics card!
OK, so it takes quite a while for FSX to actually load anything, which is why I went and baought some more RAM for it from the Crucial Memory website. 4GB for under 40 quid! Not bad at all if I may say so myself! The only thing to do now is see if I can actually upgrade the processor and graphics card for the lappy. Probably not…
