“The abundance of mine-able self help IT info, and powerful freeware can make anybody with just a little patience and perseverance, “look like” they know what they’re doing.”
I make stupid statements like that, amid much swaggering and button busting, every time I win a small battle with computers. This has resulted in my desk turning into a no-kill shelter for the extended family’s sick machines. Serves me right for bragging.
So,…my niece from the east side of town dropped off an HP Pavilion dv4 laptop. (win 7 64 bit) A year out of warranty, and the HD won’t boot. The short version; this model had a high percentage of mobo problems, causing the HD to suddenly stop booting, preventing restore process, (from restore partition or HP restore disks) from completing, also preventing a clean win 7 install on a new HD from completing. Boat anchor.
But, in the process I stumbled onto Puppy Linux, a super stripped down distribution of Linux, downloadable as a bootable 200 MB ISO file. Burn the ISO onto a CD/DVD, change the BIO settings to boot from CD/DVD, pop it in the drive, boot the laptop, and Linux loads completely into, and runs from the RAM. Fricking amazing, and fast as hell!
Nice simple XP like desktop, automatically detected my wi-fi router, and after I gave it the key, downloaded Firefox, and I was cruising. Has desktop links for a complete freeware office suite, bunches of utilities, email, etc..
I could see the non-booting HD, and used the included burner app to back all my niece’s data onto DVD.
I’m reading now, how to set up a bootable jump drive, and RAM partition. (To save configuration settings)
Fast as hell, and it’s running without a HD! Very fun to play with.
Download site Here