More on laptops I have loved and love

Junior HP

2017

First post on Junior HP

Posted on February 5, 2017 by Neil

Well, here we are back in West Wollongong, with a fair bit of setting up still to go. Next to see what I can save from backups on various storage devices.

 

Baby HP: RIP

28th January 2017

And today I paid for JUNIOR HP! Thanks to those WHS friends for their kindness.

I don’t take delivery until Wednesday, so I have set myself some homework:

I told the story recently on Facebook

Meet Junior HP and thanks 7.5 years on to Stewart Holt, Nick Southall, Marion Schausberger and all those late 70s/early 80s WHS people who helped bring it into my life!

Junior HP, my Windows 10 laptop, is old and its capacity is small, but by God it is the best I ever had. I took delivery of it on 4th February 2017! It was gifted to me by a small band of wonderful ex-students from Wollongong High — from 40+ years ago! I nurse it carefully through its occasional pains.

Like the time at City Diggers when it had beer spilt on the keyboard. Or the time it fell out of my backpack and crashed onto Mount Keira Road. Or the more recent times when ominous burping and flashing made me fear it was dying at last, but it turned out that all was well except for something a bit loose inside. That is stiill the case, but a discreet bump fixes it. It has now been in that state for over twelve months, but still Junior HP soldiers on.

Despite the most used keys having the lettering quite rubbed away, which does lead me to strike wrong keys rather often…

Then there is the capacity issue. That is 57GB. Lately the free space had been around 2-3GB. Under some conditions it has dropped to a few hundred MB! Then it struggles, so I restart which clears space and allows me to go on.

But the other day Adobe tried to update my Acrobat reader, and failed because of insufficient space. So I searched and found Slim PDF Reader, downloaded it, uninstalled Acrobat thoroughly using Revo Uninstaller, and installed Slim which takes up only 47.9MB.

Result? I now have 8GB free space! Acrobat was a monster! Slim does save by using your browser to display the PDFs, and it works well with Edge. I also have and have long had Bullzip PDF Printer for making PDF versions — and it is very good.

Here is part of the 1992 Foreword by Edward Said of “The Question of Palestine”, which I recommended earlier today, showing how Edge renders it from Slim PDF Reader.

My eBook Library on Calibre takes up 2.47GB by the way. It holds 3,249 books at the moment.

Back in May 2023

Posted on May 16, 2023 by Neil

My laptop was showing ominous signs yesterday morning — display flashing like crazy. Junior HP is after all six years old — the longest a computer has lasted for me!

And in July

I see it is around two months since I first mentioned the flashing screen issue on my six-year-old HP laptop. I narrowed the problem down to a “loose screw” somewhere as the actual computer components seem to be working fine. No problem with the main solid state disk drive — it has no hard disk. No problems with any of the software items. And when a fit occurs, a gentle tap or two of the laptop against my knee stops it. Sometimes indeed it will go for ages with no fits at all, as in my first session this morning.

I have resisted buying a new laptop, even if that is what must happen — and yes, thanks to going twelve years without any cigarettes I can afford one!

As you can see Junior HP is soldiering on

But yesterday I backed up in two ways, first to the cloud using Windows tools. and then to my portable hard drive, a My Passport even older than Junior HP. For that I combined straight copying of My Documents in its latest version, and a few other things, plus a system backup using this:

Learn more.

And on Edward Said

One of many posts: Zion Dreaming.

The example of Edward Said

Lately I have been reading The Question of Palestine by Edward Said (1979) with much pleasure as well as with some pain as I contemplate what is unfolding in Palestine/Gaza/Israel today, and the sometimes dire quality of talk about it.

One simple example: “Israelis are Nazis” said in response to some very real abominable deed done as part of the apparent de facto annihilation of Gaza, an area half the size of the Wollongong area where I live. I understand the anger, but it is on so many levels a really stupid thing to say. Strictly speaking no living Israeli is a member of the National Socialist Party in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, and need I say why that whole idea is even more bizarre as anyone Jewish was most unlikely to be such a member, and indeed would by war’s end be lucky to be alive….