I’ve been having the absolute worst time with my main laptop, Envy, lately. Envy, which was already physically unstable because of its broken bezel, became completely inoperable when its Windows 10 installation ran into some serious problems. I ended up replacing Windows with Ubuntu Linux just to get a working computer again.
Envy’s “Death”
The downward spiral began with the arrival of an error message about my hard drive’s “imminent failure.” Yes, I yelled a bunch of expletives. There is no time frame covered by the word “imminent” wherein I’ll have enough money to buy a new laptop. Replacing Envy’s hard drive with another one was a more feasible option at $50, though I would risk further breaking the bezel.
As if the hardware failure wasn’t bad enough, Windows 10 started acting crazy too. Envy often took at least 30 minutes to boot up and froze up a lot, especially when waking up from sleep or hibernation mode. There were also glitches like the menus having no text and the desktop icons randomly changing size. Historically, Envy has acted weird when it needed to be updated. So I ran two updates, which brought Windows fully up to date. Each update was only a temporary fix. The computer would work better for a day or two, then the weirdness would start again.
Meanwhile, the freezing fits got worse. It got so bad one day that I had to do the Ctrl-Alt-Del trick for the first time ever. What a horrible idea! Envy launched into an endless loop of disk checking. I was able to stop the process with some command line help. That time. From then on, the disk check popped up every time I booted the computer. Windows gave me an out with a “Press any key in X seconds” message to skip the process for a long time, but that grace period eventually gave way to an unavoidable and unending disk check. I couldn’t even boot into Windows proper anymore.
Let me tell ya—e-ve-ry fix I came up with hit a roadblock. I couldn’t do any of the command prompt tricks I found online because my user account didn’t have administrative access. I couldn’t reset the computer because the process either got stuck or refused to initiate at all. I couldn’t use my Windows 7 disc to repair the installation or downgrade because I was apparently “missing files.” I couldn’t reinstall Windows 10 because my external disc drive refused to load the ISO file I burned to a disc and my attempts to make a bootable flash drive failed.
I have never wanted to punch a computer more in my life.
The Workarounds
Although I was frustrated as hell with the whole situation, I was somewhat comforted by the fact that I had several other devices to use. Then they, too, turned on me.
My iPad mini, Sleepless Beauty, was an option. I thought I could access my files with the Google Drive app, write in the Plaintext app, and post with the WordPress app. This route was a hassle because my iPad is too old to run the latest version of anything, and the extra apps strained my already limited storage space. Moreover, working on that small screen without a Bluetooth keyboard wasn’t particularly fun.
My netbook, Bluebell, was a no-go. It announced upon startup that its version of Ubuntu couldn’t (easily) be upgraded anymore. Then I discovered that Bluebell’s battery no longer holds a charge. Bummer. What good is a netbook without a battery?
My last hope was my very first laptop, the Presario. If I was gonna be tethered to a charger, I would rather do it on a computer with a bigger screen and a more recent version of Ubuntu installed. I had a copy of my files from Envy on a flash drive and my second favorite Markdown editor Ghostwriter installed, making it easy to work on my posts.
It would have been perfect if I hadn’t run into problems with accessing my WordPress dashboard, presumably as a result of trying to use a web browser on a computer with only 2 GB of RAM. Setting up email posting was too complicated for my already frazzled brain. I figured I would just copy my completed files to my phone and post them through the WordPress Android app. Clunky indeed.
Starting Over
I reached the point where I got tired of the constant workarounds and compromises. My Windows installation was broken in a way that was clearly beyond my skills to fix. I was wasting copious amounts of time and phone data without getting anywhere. The Presario was okay but too limited. I knew what I had to do: install Linux on Envy. Envy is new and powerful enough that I knew it would have no problems under Linux.
I created an Ubuntu startup disk on the Presario with the Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS ISO file and my 8 GB flash drive. Envy fought me on this too—it took two tries to get the installation to go through successfully—but I was happy with the results. I installed my usual apps and transferred my files over. I was finally able to be productive again!
Conclusion
I’m thankful that everything worked out as well as it did. Ubuntu has always been a great OS, and I’m not doing anything that it can’t handle.
To be clear, though, the new OS didn’t solve Envy’s underlying problems with Envy. Every time I boot up the computer, Ubuntu reminds me that the hard drive is about to die. Additionally, I’ve run into two disk check situations where the computer refused to boot until I ran a manual scan. I didn’t even know how to do that on a Linux system until I googled it. All-in-all, I just put a Band-aid on the situation.
Nuking Windows cost me some things too. My whole story-writing system is broken. I can’t use Scrivener on Linux and I lost my OneNote story notes (my fault for not having synced them to the cloud). Worst of all, I can’t use iTunes anymore. I have no way to manage my iPad, I can’t access my iTunes library data, and I’ll have to figure out a new way to organize my music.
But I won’t complain. I’m just glad to have a working computer again.
Update 10/29/21:
The respite I enjoyed from installing Ubuntu on Envy was brief indeed. The same problems I had experienced under Windows—the freezing and the increasingly frequent disk checks—started up again on Ubuntu. Obviously, the hard drive, not the OS, was the culprit. On a whim, I decided to see if I could transfer the 80 GB hard drive from my old laptop, the Presario, into Envy.
Since the swap was such an impulsive idea, I rushed through the process and made a crapload of mistakes. I didn’t store the screws like I should have, so Envy’s bottom panel is missing about three screws and I had to use the slightly longer screws to secure the hard drive enclosure to Envy’s motherboard. On top of that, the Presario’s hard drive was slightly thicker than Envy’s, which caused a noticeable lump across the palm rest, extra flex across the keyboard, and a big gap between the front ledge and the bottom panel on the left side. And of course, the bezel/hinge situation got worse. I literally had to put it back together with electrical tape.
Beyond all of that, the swap seems to have worked. I reinstalled Ubuntu 20.04 LTS over the 32-bit version of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS that the Presario had been running. Even though the hard drive is 14 years old, I haven’t gotten any imminent failure messages. It should get me through for now.
*Ubuntu logo © Canonical Ltd*