Retarded industrial designer

I would like very much to torture the designer of the Compaq NC6000 notebook computer. I had one with a dead Real Time Clock cell and it took me a couple of hours, following instructions, to access the cell, which is deep inside the machine, in fact stuck underneath the body top cover. You end up even having to remove the CPU heatsink to lift that cover.


Do designers believe that these cells (CR2016 or CR2032) never die? This is not the first laptop I encountered that had a difficult to access RTC cell. I feel it's a conspiracy to create work for computer technicians.


If you are unlucky to have the same symptoms (computer will not remember time), search on the Internet for the NC6000 service manual which has disassembly instructions. The cell I removed had solder tags. I simply peeled off the tags and sticky taped them on a new cell. Hopefully it will last until the laptop becomes obsolescent.

A look at Lubuntu 10.10

This review is far in the past so out of date as Lubuntu has advanced a lot, but I'm leaving it here for posterity.

 I'm always interested in lightweight distros for older machines. A while back I looked at Lubuntu 10.04. Lubuntu 10.10 came out recently so I decided to see if the issues I mentioned were fixed.

I burnt the image to a CD-RW and booted an old Celeron 400MHz with 256MB RAM with it.

On the standard Ubuntu splash screen I see there is now an option to install right away, so I picked that. However the machine then churned away for many minutes. Finally I got a desktop with an Install icon. Silly me, I thought that if I picked Install to Disk it would not waste time setting up a desktop but go straight into the installer like Ubuntu does.

I clicked on the Install icon and after a long wait with more CD reading it said that Ubiquity had crashed. I must have clicked several times in succession because one of the attempts did bring up the first stage of the install dialog, but that didn't last long and crashed too.

Ok, maybe I should try it in a VirtualBox VM. Again, assign the same amount of RAM, 256MB, to the VM.

The first try I used the host CD drive. It eventually brought up the desktop with the Install icon, but the desktop was unresponsive, showing a wristwatch wait icon. I noticed that it was doing a lot of probing on the USB port. Why?

The second try I copied the ISO image to the disk and booted from that. This one also brought up the desktop and then Ubiquity crashed again. Again there was a lot of activity on the USB port. What was it doing?

At this point, I decided that this was all a waste of time. Sorry, I cannot recommend Lubuntu 10.10. if anything it's a regression from 10.04. Maybe I don't have enough RAM, but other LXDE distros installed fine with that much RAM. If you want a LXDE desktop, I recommend Mint 9 LXDE or Debian 5 LXDE both of which installed fully on that Celeron.