One laptop: free to good home (claimed!) · 6:51am Mar 12th, 2019
So far, March has been more than a little crazy. In between a job search, a Search & Rescue callout that lasted until 5 AM, a network failure at work, and a short-notice trip to help my parents with their taxes, my writing schedule has gotten completely shot. I'm finally sitting down at a coffee shop for the first time in a week, and I'm too distracted to add words to stories. So I might as well justify tonight's cuppa by passing on some positive karma.
The reason I'm distracted tonight, you see, is that I finally replaced my writing laptop. A few years back, I bought an Asus Eeebook purely for authorial purposes; it magnificently met all my needs at low cost, and I'd have been happy to keep using it indefinitely except that its trackpad went out.
Even then, I just started carrying around a USB mouse to plug into it -- but when the USB port also started acting up, that was my last straw. It was literally more cost-efficient for me to replace the laptop than to go down the rabbit hole of installing new drivers and buying replacement parts and spending hours of my time pulling off the case again. (The new machine is an Asus Vivobook -- nearly the exact same laptop in the same housing, but with double the RAM, and Windows 10 instead of Windows 8. $159 (!!!) new on sale at Best Buy.)
As you can tell by the price, this is the lowest of low-end computers ... but it's absolutely perfect for a dedicated writing laptop:
- It runs a full, normal version of Windows -- so you can use Scrivener and/or your common word processor of choice, and it supports Dropbox for free cross-platform cloud backups and syncing.
- It's the smallest machine I've ever found with a full-sized keyboard (a necessity for my huge yeti hands).
- It's the size of an iPad -- or a thick pad of 8.5x11/A4 paper -- and light as a feather, so it's gorgeously portable.
- It runs on a tablet-style Atom processor, rather than a laptop-style Celeron, so it gets insane battery life given its cost. (When it was new, I often put in a 10+ hour workday without plugging it in! I'd estimate it still gets six on a charge if you keep the screen brightness low and minimize background app use.)
That said, the machine I'm migrating away from does come with some caveats:
- The specs are garbage for anything besides writing and web browsing. It's never given me a problem running Scrivener or Google Chrome -- at least with an industrial-strength ad and script blocker running -- or the occasional 16-bit retro indie rpg, but its 2 GB memory and 32 GB storage will grind to a complete halt if you expect it to do anything like multimedia editing. Playing background Youtube videos while you write is about the most I'd expect from it.
- As previously noted, this particular Eeebook has a damaged trackpad; specifically, there's a small broken plastic bit in the bottom left corner which is supposed to engage when you press the trackpad to click it. So, when the trackpad isn't disabled, it's convinced that the mouse button is held down full-time. (I keep the trackpad disabled via its Fn+F9 keyboard shortcut.)
- As further previously noted, the USB ports are also erratically acting up: sometimes it'll play the little "you just disconnected a USB device" ditty, the mouse will freeze, and a few seconds later, it'll play the "you connected a device" ditty and start working again, and maybe get stuck in that loop until you unplug it for a while. This happens with both ports and with every mouse I've tried.
A pretty big caveat, obviously. But if that's not a dealbreaker, I'd like to offer the old machine to someone who can use it -- for free. Literally free, as in, I'll even eat the shipping cost, domestic or international. And I'll scrub my personal files and accounts, but I'll keep the basic setup in place -- so you can piggyback off of my installed copy of Scrivener if you don't have a favorite writing environment already.
If there are multiple takers, I'll pick based on a combination of first-come-first-serve and need. I would prefer to see this go to someone who needs a first/replacement computer for pony writing and/or blogging, but the deal is still open even if no authors speak up.
Let me know in comments if you'd have a use for the ol' girl. I'll pick someone in a day or two and work out the details via PM.
wow. that's cool and all, but what Search and Rescue thing?
Now to reformat your new computer to get rid of all that shit bloatware that Best buy put on it.
I have pending uses that could do with a long-battery-life highly-portable Atom with full-sized keyboard, but I haven't yet hashed out whether flaky USB would make them unworkable. Most of them are also dependent on whether I could throw a Linux on it sanely (including whether she'd be okay with that).
I have a mild surplus of devices in general, mind, so compared to many I might be pretty low on the need scale, but
I'll tentatively edge onto the list if there's no objections.(Retracted: See follow-up comment below.)May I poke you elsewhere tomorrowish about details?(that sentence came out wrong)(FWIW, I would be happy to make it my go-to device for ponyficcing away from home if my transient burst of Writeoff inspiration leads into anything longer-lasting (which I hope it will), but that's so speculative in the current moment that I don't think it counts.
)
A piece of spec that seems important: what kinds of connectivity does it have besides USB? I assume Wi-Fi—but what kind, and what else?
Added later: Oh, oops, you linked the specs in the post! I'll repeat the bits that seem most relevant, in case other people were wondering: Bluetooth, micro HDMI, micro SD reader, 1366×768 screen resolution. The linked page doesn't actually say anything about Wi-Fi, but other sources imply dual-band bgn.
I have one of these! I got it to be a writing laptop too! It was so slow, that I actually ripped it open, installed new ram. Thermal pasted every chip. Sped up the fan. And it's STILL slow.
I feel that, man.
My laptop just shit the bed not too long ago and left me without any real hope of replacing it in a timely fashion, so I'm interested.
I could really use something like that for work/writing but I do already have a computer so it's not a need kinda thing.
5026867
This particular device has a very weird and non-standard BIOS, so you will need to jump through some hoops to get it working. You will get Linux working given enough determination, but combined with the hardware troubles it's probably not worth the effort.
5026857
When I'm not working or writing, I volunteer for my county's Search & Rescue team. This has led in the past to some adventures, including a week-long deployment to sift through the ashes of the Camp Fire.
5026866
Yeah, I'll be making pretty liberal use of the Uninstall button.
5026908
Yeah, it's literally the cheapest laptop on the market and you get what you pay for. Even something like scrolling through a directory of high-res Derpibooru pic downloads can bog it down (as it tries to process the files for image thumbnails). I would absolutely not recommend this to anyone who had any illusions of using it for general laptop purposes.
But I've never had problems with my word processor, even on the base specs. So the slowness is actually a kind of perverse feature: it encourages me not to install anything on it that I don't need for writing. And it's fantastic that I can carry around a computer in a small man-purse rather than needing to haul around a laptop bag.
I'll also note to anyone who loves the idea of the computer — cheap, low weight, small size, great battery, full Windows, full-size keyboard — but doesn't need a janky donated machine: the one I just bought is a "Vivobook", an Asus E203MA. I don't know when Best Buy's sale ends, but you can currently buy it for $159 on their website. That's an unheard of price for a new laptop, if it fits your use case and the negatives (small screen, no disk space, sloooooow for non-writing use) aren't dealbreakers.
5026866
You typically can't reformat these low-end computers--they don't come with a Windows installation disk, which would cost as much as the computer. If the OS goes bad, you switch to Linux or throw them out.
I still have an Asus EEE that I bought in 2002 or so, running Windows 7. I would still be using it if I could have expanded it to 4G RAM, or if I could have used Windows XP on it, but 2G RAM is not enough to run Windows 7. I'd have to wait about 10 seconds every time I switched windows.
A lot of people threw theirs out when they installed the free "upgrade" to Windows 10, which (a) wouldn't install fully, bcoz the hard drive was too small, and (B) it wouldn't "run" so much as "crawl", bcoz 2G is not nearly enough for Windows 10.
I can still use my Asus fine if I boot it with a Linux USB stick.
5026867 5026914 5026957
I'll respond to the actual requests tomorrow in order to give everyone time to see the post.
5026867
According to the Device Manager, wifi on the Eeebook is 802.11abgn. But I'll repeat the cautionary note: even if you were to buy a new one retail rather than take the donation, this is literally one of the cheapest laptops you can get. If your use case requires anything beyond "it'll let me connect to the internet", you almost certainly want a better machine.
5026987
Thank you for your expertise.
5026995
The Eeebook I'm offering here has 2 GB. It's got Windows 8.1, and I've never had delays of even close to 10 seconds for normal operations like window-switching; my normal experience is to have it already switched by the time I let go of alt-tab. On the other claw, I also keep it trimmed extremely lean — I do my editing in Scrivener and keep my background web usage leashed, and removed most of the preinstalled garbageware, so it's not paging as much memory as it otherwise would be. I suspect my experience would be different if I tried to run bloatware like Office, or if I was working regularly with very large google docs (I can start to see it lag on 20+ page documents with large numbers of comments).
I did not upgrade from Windows 8 to Windows 10 during the free upgrade period, because (as you note) it didn't have the disk space.
The new Vivobook has Windows 10, but also has 4 GB RAM built-in.
Edit: Just noticed that yours is from 2002, which is probably a significant factor behind the slowness. 2002 is, like, Celestia-and-Luna old in laptop years.
My Eeebook is from … four years ago?
5026996
After doing a bit more research and plan-sketching, I've decided to retract my original interest for now due to a stack of ineffectuality risks. I hope the machine winds up somewhere good, though!
5027000
Yeah, it should run okay if you don't open Chrome. It would probably run better with Firefox, which at least used to use a single process to manage all tabs, instead of a separate process for each tab. (The downside is that Firefox would thus always crash if you opened even one tab that crashed.) Also, yes, avoid google docs on a 2G machine. A docs page can easily use up half a gig of RAM.
It's too bad nobody makes netbooks anymore. I don't like typing on tablets.
5026994
I'll add for the record, in case anyone else had thoughts similar to mine rather than the more straightforward originally suggested use, that there's quite a lot less documentation on Linux options for that, whereas on the X205TA, while janky (firmware weirdness, 32-bit UEFI(‽), Atom-related power management weirdness which folks on the kernel bug tracker have been going around tinkering at for over three years), it's at least gone through a lot of other people's attempts to get it to work, including entries on the Debian and Arch wikis. Part of the whole “new hardware third-party integration lag” thing, I suppose (and part of why I wind up keeping an eye out for used hardware at times).
5026995
Depends what kind of installation type Best Buy uses. I forget the naming conventions, but effectively there's Windows installation that lets you reformat without a licence and one that doesn't, and that information can be found via some liberal Google-fu and the command prompt, from what I remember when doing this to my old laptop. Fun stuff.
5026992
oh
5027012
Just wanted to point out that the key is in the BIOS since UEFI on newer machines now for windows and if it isn't the OP can just run the generic OEM key for the version of windows and it will activate as MS will see the OEM MOBO it uses ect. I do this all the time for clients. Some times preload from HP ect even already are running these as well.
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/95922-generic-product-keys-install-windows-10-editions.html
5027041
Yeah, this sounds right. Do this, horizon.
Alright, it's been about 24 hours since I've gotten my last comment here (except for Corejo's above). Time to settle the donation.
5026914
Given that you're currently without a laptop, I'm going to give you first dibs on this. I'll repeat my warning that it's not going to be a satisfying experience if you were planning on using it for general-purpose computing rather than just writing, but it's certainly better than nothing!
Shoot me a PM if you're up for it and we can work out the details.
5026957
See above. I'll drop you a line if IR declines.
5027318
It does sound like something that will get and keep me writing if it literally cannot do anything else.
5027318
Well thanks for considering and it's super rad of you to give it away regardless, I'll keep an eye out just in case.
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And it's heading out in the mail today!
With that, post is closed. Well, I mean, I can't stop people from writing more comments here, but there's nothing more to discuss, and IR and I can hash any further shipping issues out via PM.
5031213
That's right! You can't stop me from talking! So uh... how's the weather?
you forgot to describe the most important feature of any laptop:
what awesome stickers did you put on the case?
(no really i'm curious)
5031612
rain ;_;
5031788
Great question actually!
A giant Apple logo over the Asus logo on the case front; an awesome dragon outline I got from a furry convention; and the slogan, "Better done than perfect," which I'm already missing.
5031900
At least the rain means winter is over. Well if it was cold wherever you are, if not I hope it turns around soon.
5031788
It's pretty legit. It does need to be stated that it's the old rainbow Apple logo. When they actually were worth a damn.