Windows 10 on an old laptop

It won't be easy, no, it won't be easy without you, no no no, in the words of Justin Heyward

Way back in October 2012 I upgraded my old 2ghz ThinkPad X61 from Windows XP to Windows 8. I still use that machine quite often - most recently as a musical instrument - and although it's eight years old it's still pretty good. I've upgraded mine with extra memory and a solid state drive. It's useless for games but otherwise it works just fine as a kind of Windows-powered Chromebook. Now that Windows 10 has come out I decided to test it out, and my X61 was close to hand.

Windows 8.1 - the much-reviled Start screen (top), and the desktop (bottom)

The machine came into this world in 2007 with Windows XP Pro. I've upgraded it to Windows 8 Pro (£25, a special offer) and then 8.1 Pro (free) and 10 Pro (free). There is also a Home version of Windows 10. The Pro version doesn't have any killer features that distinguish it from Home, but Home is for women. I'm not a woman, for heaven's sake. I'm not telling people that I have Windows 10 Home.

This raises the question of whether you can get hold of the Pro version of Windows 10 by picking up a crappy old XP Pro laptop and upgrading it. It's an interesting proposition although I don't think that it's viable, because you have to upgrade to Windows 7 or Windows 8->8.1 first. You can't upgrade straight from XP. This adds anything from £50-100 to the cost depending on how legitimate you want to be - Windows 7 upgrades are actually more expensive, because they're no longer available new - in which case why not spend a little extra and buy a laptop with Windows 7 Pro already installed? Hmm? Note that whereas my XP-Windows 8 upgrade essentially wiped XP, the 8.1-10 upgrade kept everything as it was.

Windows 10 is being rolled out via Windows Update progressively, but you can beat the queue by going here and downloading it from Microsoft. You have two options - an in-place install, or an ISO that you can burn / write to installation media (in which case you have to be careful to pick the right version of Windows 10).

The most powerful XP Pro laptops came out in 2007 and perhaps 2008, "the year of the Vista-XP downgrade". XP devices were sold for a couple of years after that, but they tended to be low-cost, low-power netbooks. The cream of 2007's crop were late Core II Duo laptops running at 2.6ghz or thereabouts, with 4gb or 8gb memory ceilings and 1440x900 screens if you were lucky. Nowadays these machines are, as with the X61, still competent if you can find them cheap enough. The T61p, which had a 1920x1200 screen and a separate graphics card, is not bad at all. I prefer the X61 because it's smaller; it was unusually small in 2007 and has aged well.

But I digress. Microsoft's attitude seems to be that you already have Windows, so you might as well upgrade. There will be boxed versions of Windows 10, but not until August. Do you remember when people queued up for boxed versions of Windows 95? Do you remember when PC software was sold in shops?

Star Cops was pretty much symptomatic of Britain's dysfunctional... look, I always thought that although Red Dwarf was a sitcom, it was a better sci-fi show that most sci-fi shows. The first series in particular had a philosophical, melancholic tone. The writers were obviously huge sci-fi nerds but they could do characterisation and storytelling as well.

You know, there comes a time in a man's life when he looks deep into his soul and instead of seeing Clint Eastwood peering back at him, he sees Arnold Rimmer. "An incompetent vending machine repairman with a Napoleon complex who commanded as much respect and affection from his fellow crew members as Long John Silver's parrot." Isn't that all of us? Lister was the hero, but I suspect that Rimmer was how the writers saw themselves; Lister was an ideal.

Inevitably Microsoft wants to own your life, like diverticulitis - but whereas diverticulitis requires antibiotics and/or surgery, Microsoft's clingyness can be dismissed with a few boxes.

But can it be dismissed entirely? We are all pawns in a great war between the forces of Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Google. Where once there were nation states, now there are giant data farms, vying with each other to own our souls, so that they can sell us shopping machines that help us shop for more shopping machines, and smartphones that help them sell shopping machines to us. "Our children will live, Mr Beale, to see a perfect world in which there is no war or famine, no oppression or brutality - one vast and ecumenical holding company, for which all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused."

I'm digressing here. Back in the early 2000s Apple came up with the idea of launching OS X and then gradually upgrading it, without making major changes to the core OS, or at least without making major changes to the interface. I have used OS 10.4 Tiger (2005), 10.6 Snow Leopard (2009) and 10.10 Yosemite (current), and they look and feel basically the same. As far as I'm concerned an OS should be a transparent thing that gets out of the way; I have a MacBook so I can use Logic, not so I can use OS X, although as it happens I like OS X. It gets a lot of stick in the computing world - hardcore Linux fans don't generally get along with Apple, and in any case they would prefer it if OS X didn't exist; Windows people never use it and pooh-pooh it because it's an Apple product; the great mass of humanity never uses it; Macintosh owners aren't aware of it, because they don't care about OSes. But it has never let me down and it just works.

During most of OS X's lifespan Microsoft generally maintained the Windows look and feel, although you often had to do a lot of clicking to get back the standard taskbar and start menu, and some things were changed irrevocably. But the rise of the smartphone and the tablet and the market for apps in the 2010s threw a spanner in the works. Apple decided to develop a new operating system for the iPhone/iPod/iPad - iOS - and Apple apps are written for it. It must have been tempting to port OS X for mobile devices, but Apple decided not to, and although the company is often dismissed as a shallow bunch of fashionable hipsters creating fashion trinkets for hip fashionistas, its OS strategy was simple and effective.

And... it looks a lot like Windows 8.1, with some tweaks. From start to finish it took about forty minutes, not counting time spent downloading it.

"A shallow bunch of fashionable hipsters creating fashion trinkets for hip fashionistas", that's quality writing you know. It has rhythm, it flows off the tongue. The overuse of fashion- and hip- was deliberate. It's supposed to imply that I'm tired and bored with the kind of people who dismiss Apple users as fashionable etc, because their stance is tired and boring.

Yeah but right in contrast Microsoft initially had a separate mobile OS in the form of Windows CE, which was joined with but not replaced by Windows Mobile which was replaced by Windows Phone and meanwhile there was Windows RT which was a bit like Windows but for ARM and also there was Windows 8, which could run on desktop machines and tablets but not smartphones. Got that?

The duality of Windows 8 irritated a lot of people, although over time I have grown to ignore it. Windows 10 is an attempt to gather some of this together, although there is still a separate Windows 10 Mobile which hasn't been released yet. I just don't care about this section of the article any more.

10 - can I call it 10? - has a new Action Centre, roughly analogous to the old Charms menu.

I wonder what they've done with the Start screen. Let's hit the Windows key and bring up the Start screen. Let's see how they have tweaked the Start screen. I can't wait:

Oh. They've got rid of the Start screen. There's no more Start screen. You can enable an imitation by fiddling with the personalisation features, but it's not the same. Like Joffrey Baratheon from television's Game of Thrones the Start screen reigned briefly, no-one liked it, no-one will miss it. To be fair it works fine on my Linx 10 tablet. It's not so much the interface that angered people but its ubiquity on non-tablet devices. A rare case of Microsoft having the right idea, but too soon and too much instead of too late and not enough.

You can expand the new miniature start screen / start menu out to the right. If you want shortcuts to the rest of your apps you click "all apps", in which case you get a straightforward alphabetical list. Unless you have more than 512 shortcuts in which case it breaks, apparently.

Cortana is Microsoft's new digital assistant. When I envisage digital assistants, I think of Jane Wiedlin's Singing Telegram Girl from Clue, which pleases me. Clue is one of those films that isn't very good but everybody remembers it, like Innerspace or Explorers. Men remember Clue for Colleen Camp, who played the french maid, and at this point all the male readers of this blog are nodding. I'll save you time, just highlight "colleen camp" clue and right-click and search google for and images.

Microsoft has a new browser, which as you can see is called Microsoft E

It's a "start screen app" - apps launch in a window now, and although the X61's 1024x768 screen is behind the curve it's a shame Microsoft didn't test this out more thoroughly.

Will I use Edge? Why?

Hearteningly my existing setup is retained intact. Windows 10 doesn't crash or throw a wobbly. There was a time when each new version of Windows required a more powerful computer, but that seemed to fizzle out with Vista, which was widely panned for its bloat.

Over the last few years there has been a general emphasis on low power consumption and light weight, and Windows 10 has surprisingly modest system requirements - 1gb of memory, a 1ghz CPU, an 800x600 screen, around 20gb hard drive space. In theory that covers late Pentium III machines(!) but in practice I understand that BIOS, CPU and graphics problems mean that it won't work with pre-Pentium M devices, or at least not without hacking it.

 

There is a new Tablet mode that also emulates the Start Screen and is entirely optional. Microsoft should have implemented this back with Windows 8. Presumably from now on Windows 8.1 will have security updates but will otherwise be left to wither on the vine. Shed a tear for the concept of Windows service packs; the last one was Windows 7's first and last service pack back in 2011. Note that although the X61 has rubbish integral Intel graphics, it still copes with transparency, and in use Windows 10 feels fast and snappy. The Samsung 840 probably helps.

Returning to the topic of a cheap laptop, if the X61 copes then any late Core II Duo upgraded to Windows 10 with the hard drive replaced with a cheap 120gb SSD (about £50) should be just fine as a general productivity machine under Windows 10. I would pick one in tip-top condition. Does Windows 10 work on Macintosh hardware? I have a Macbook, but I'm not minded to try it out; I use it for music and I have it set up just right.

Controversially, updates are now downloaded without your say-so. The Pro version of Windows 10 lets you schedule restarts and I believe the Enterprise version lets you defer them. After installing Windows 10 there were two small updates as above.

The modern trend is for text-based searching rather than hunting through menus. Linux fans are generally smug, but wasn't it Ubuntu that introduced the idea of searching Amazon when you just want to open the device manager, hmm?

The install also added some Lenovo rubbish that seems to just run Disc Cleanup. I got rid of this. The X61's hardware is mostly generic although it has some oddities - a fingerprint reader (unusual for 2007), a TrackPoint nipple, a ThinkLight in the bezel that points down at the keyboard, and some kind of whitelisted wi-fi card. All of this worked. A while back I upgraded the BIOS with a special "Middleton BIOS" that enables SATA II, and Windows 10 either doesn't notice or doesn't care about this.

On Windows 8.0, SuperPi calculated Pi to 2m digits in 1m 02 seconds (right at the bottom). With Windows 10 it performs the same sums in 57 seconds! My hunch is that this is some kind of quirk rather than a genuine performance improvement. The new DirectX 12 is apparently faster than its predecessors, which may or may not influence the CPU's ability to calculate Pi. Subjectively the X61 seems to run slightly cooler than before; my recollection is that XP ran fairly cool, Windows 8 and 8.1 blew the fan more often, and after a few hours of trying Windows 10 seems to be cool again, with the machine idling at around 40c vs 50c as before. The X61's compact case is notorious for heating up quickly. The battery life seems much the same.

So, Windows 10. It introduces a lot of new features that you have already read about elsewhere. My immediate impression is that it's Windows 8.1 with a tarted-up menu system. No doubt under the hood a lot of clever stuff is going on, but from the perspective of this user, the upgrade process is quick, and it works. And I have demonstrated that an eight-year-old but well-maintained ThinkPad X61 will run Windows 10.

The big quandry; do I upgrade my desktop machine from Windows 7 Pro to Windows 10? It seems painless but I have far more installed on my desktop machine. Not yet.

Windows 8.1: Candy and a Currant Bun

And so it came to pass that on the day Morrissey's autobiography was released, Microsoft chose to update Windows 8. The company has added a couple of arrows and a button that doesn't do much and point one. Windows 8 was a shock when it was new, and some people thought it should be bludgeoned in its bed, but I've grown to mostly forget about it. Has it changed, or have I changed?

I'm looking forward to the next edition, Windows 8.11, which will add support for Workgroups. What are Workgroups? Well, Workgroups are a kind of peer-to-peer network along the lines of Apple's AppleTalk. Imagine this scenario - you've got a room full of PCs, and a very expensive laser printer in the corner, and you want to send something to it for printing. Ordinarily you'd save your work to a floppy disc and transfer it to the machine connected to the laser printer, but what if you could hook all the PCs to the laser printer with a cable, wouldn't that be great? You wouldn't have to walk across the room any more. You could be in another room. You could print out a sheet of paper that says YOU ARE A POOPY-HEAD and no-one would know it was you.

Tomorrow morning we'll be miles away / on another continent and another day

In theory you could buy a room full of Macs instead, but they're expensive. And different. Now imagine that instead of being connected to a laser printer, your Workgroup is connected to the telephone line - and on the other side of the world there is a room much like your own, and your Workgroup is connected to that Workgroup, and you can share files and things with people on the other side of the world. Which is Australia. Right now, the cost of international telecommunication is too expensive for this to be a reality, and of course there are political barriers, but one day all of humankind will be one race, one creed, and information will be free. In the far future we won't need to transmit things to the other side of the world any more, because they will already know everything we know, but until that comes to pass, information will be clumped, and unevenly spread.

The future of humankind will not be a boot stamping on a person's face forever, because all complex systems fall apart, and the world of 1984 was a very complex system. Good and evil both require energy to keep going, and the more extreme the regime the more energy is required, until the energy that might have gone into advancing the regime is instead wasted on perpetuating it. Tyranny and utopia are doomed to fail, in the long run; the future of humanity is a kind of middling averageness, which is at least preferable to a nightmare of torture and brutality.

And if life cannot be a dream, at least we might get a good night's sleep. But that is enough of Morrissey's autobiography. Sorry about the "Windows 8.11" gag up there, by the way, that joke isn't funny any more. Ere long gone last year I do done did stick Windows 8 on an old ThinkPad X61, a 2ghz Core II Duo machine from 2006. Despite the generally horrified reaction that Windows 8 received in the specialist press it works surprisingly well in a mobile context - it's easy to forget that it was touted as a faster, slimmer alternative to Windows 7, and it feels fast even on such elderly hardware. Windows 8.1 doesn't add much of substance, but at least it doesn't hurt. Let's see what it's like.

But first, Windows 8. Look at it:

Let's imagine that I'm on the desktop, and I want to launch Windows Paint, so I fuck around with the Charms menu and there's a search box and let's try that and oh shit it tries to open the fucking store:

Well, Windows 8.1 is better, because it doesn't fuck around. It just takes you to the store straight away and fails to find Paint slightly quicker than before:

So how do you find Paint? Please, Windows 8, let me get what I want. This time. The odd relationship and interrelationship between the start screen and the desktop and the search functionality were a concern that lots of people discovered when the pre-release versions of Windows 8 came out, and unfortunately Windows 8.1 does very little to fix them. It's as if Microsoft really didn't care about the criticism. Windows 8 wasn't like any other post-95 incarnation of Windows, it was different.

But first, let's install Windows 8.1, as an upgrade from Windows 8.0. Windows 8.1 is also available as an official stand-alone DVD, unlike 8.0, which was only available as an OEM product. This was problematic; it seems that the OEM installation was tied in perpetuity to the machine on which it was first installed[1], but I am not a lawyer.

8.1 is available via the store, rather than Windows Update:

At this point the machine needs to restart. Linux fans will probably chuckle, because Linux never needs to be rebooted, which is important if you're running a nuclear reactor. Less so otherwise. Installation is really nothing. A rush and a push and it's finished. It would seem that Windows downloads a complete fresh operating system rather than a big patch, which might explain why you can't simply download the update on one of your machines and then transfer it to different machines.

By default Microsoft acts a bit like Overly Attached Girlfriend, which is worrying, because where do Microsoft's intentions lie? It's good that Oscar Wilde died a long time before he had a chance to see "let apps use my advertising ID for experiences across apps". He would have given up with writing if he had known that this was the future of the English language.

Microsoft should stop trying to make Bing happen. It's not going to happen.

Here's the new start screen. During installation it bugged me about my Microsoft account, but I've forgotten my password, and I guess that it reset my visual settings in retaliation. Hey, what's this thing in the corner?

There's a new arrow. Is it new? I can't remember it from before. Let's click on it:

Well, that certainly makes it a lot easier to get to the Apps view that I will never use. Let's see if we can find Paint from here:

I was looking for Paint and then I found Paint, and heaven knows I'm actually quite pleased. Well done, Microsoft! Seriously, this is frustration for no reason, and frustration for no reason is irritating.* An upgrade to 8.1 reinstalls all the apps you deleted, so that you can delete them again. I kept the calculator, because the thought of an app that turns my sophisticated dual-core laptop - the X61 is still a good piece of design, even seven years later - into a calculator amuses me.

* Sorry, that one was awful.

There used to be a group called The Lovin' Spoonful. Snap view is now slightly more flexible. As before, it doesn't work on the X61's old 1024x768 LCD, but with higher resolutions you can have have up to four apps per screen (as opposed to two beforehand), and you can position them arbitrarily across the screen rather than fixing them in a 75/25% ratio. Nonetheless it's still a usability nightmare and of dubious use.

It makes a bit more sense with multiple monitors, shown here with my ThinkPad X61's screen on the left, an external monitor on the rise right, two Snap apps at the top, desktop+Snap at the bottom:

It looks as if Paul McCartney is coming out of a psychedelic coffin. If we're being honest - I would never be anything less than honest with you, dear reader - this is the kind of thing that people do once, so that they can illustrate a blog post about doing it.

Here's the desktop, with the much-anticipated (cough) "start button":

Windows 8.1 takes away the Windows Experience Index score, by the way. The "about this computer" screen no longer has it. It was nice as a rough guide, at least to check if my system had acknowledged installing an SSD (for example). You can run it by opening an administrator's DOS prompt and entering winsat formal but there's no obvious way of actually seeing the results.

But let's click on the new (cough) "start button". Let's see the old start menu pop up! Yay! I can't wait. Deep in the cell of my heart I really would like to see the start menu again.

It's not strange, Microsoft just wants you to live your life this way-hey

Oh. No start menu. The new (cough) "start button" (air quotes) just duplicates the functionality of the Windows key. What a swizz! For most people the other reason for updating to 8.1 is that it can bypass the Start Screen entirely, although it's not obvious how you go about this. You need to right-click on the taskbar, like so:

And then you select "when I sign in or close all applications on a screen, go to the desktop instead of etc".

At this point it's a good idea to install Classic Shell. The combination of booting-to-the-desktop plus Classic Shell basically gives you The Windows 8 You Always Wanted. Classic Shell could boot to the desktop beforehand, but in my experience it wasn't as smooth as 8.1's implementation.

There are already a few updates:

Microsoft, so much to answer for. I wanted so badly to include more of Morrissey's solo lyrics, but not enough of his songs lend themselves to garnishing an article about Windows 8.1. Why does Windows bury its options away when Microsoft knows it makes things hard for people?

For a lark I decided to see if 8.1 knocked the machine's performance at all, so I loaded up HyperPi, and it actually took seven seconds less time to calculate Pi to two million digits than before. I'm guessing that this is down to shoddy testing on my part - I ran it once each time - but my subjective impression is that there is at the very least no obvious drop, no bloat, no juddery windows and constant fan noise.

Is there any point to 8.1 in that case? The (cough) "start button" is a LIE, there are updates to the apps that you will never use, and as before you have to install Classic Shell to get back the start menu, at which point you have something pretty good, faster than Windows 7 but not really worth the money. Unless you have a touchscreen PC, but I haven't got one. I haven't got one. I was tempted to buy one but a strange fear gripped me.

'cause it's not £25 any more. Back when I installed Windows 8.0, I upgraded from XP Professional - all the above malarky is actually built on an XP-Windows 8.0 upgrade - and the cost was £25. The kind of pricing model that Apple uses for OSX. Sadly it was a short-lived thing, and it's now £75 for an upgrade or £125 for the gooey kablooie full thing.

Put another way, if you have an old Windows 7 PC and you want to give it a new lease of life and you have £75 to spare, you can either upgrade to Windows 8.1 or you can buy a decent 120gb SSD for the same money, and install that instead. It'll be fussy depending on how your computer is set up, and you might have to spend a while shifting things off your boot partition to make space - assuming you have a boot partition - but unless and until Microsoft abruptly ceases support for Windows 7, I know which option I would prefer.

Postscript: Five Things Microsoft Could Do to Get Back its Mojo
In the words of The Pet Shop Boys' Neil Tennant, successful pop groups tend to go through an "imperial phase", during which they are at the height of their powers. It can only be recognised when it has passed, and it always passes.

The group puts out a much-anticipated, hugely popular album, preceded by a string of top singles, and then there's a cash-in film which has a limited cinema release. Slade had a film, Slade in Flame, the Spice Girls had Spice World, even the Pet Shop Boys had one (It Couldn't Happen Here, written about at great and fascinating length here for The Quietus). Usually the film is the high water mark, the peak of folly, and although the band might remain popular after that point it never recaptures its imperial phase.

The imperial phase becomes a pesky ghost, like Jacob Marley from A Christmas Carol. Or Krapp's younger self, captured forever on tape. You can't go back and it will never be the same again. The mighty fall. Skip back to the previous post, and the Kodak-Fuji film price war of the 1990s; they were masters of the world, but the world changed.

Microsoft had an imperial phase too. There was a time when Microsoft was the company that everybody loved to hate. Bill Gates was both the richest and most evil man in the world. Windows was the worst thing ever. But Microsoft was top bastard. The company saw off IBM and Lotus and Corel and everybody and it was master of the world. Nowadays Microsoft is still massively successful and wealthy, and only a fool would write the company off, but the imperial phase has passed.

So how could Microsoft make something of Windows 8, and perhaps regain some of its mojo? Some of the evil glamour it used to have. Let's imagine that I'm completely amoral. When I see a device with a screen on it, my first thought should be "does that run Microsoft software? If not, why not? If it runs something else, how can I change that?"

1. Pricing and Editions. Windows 8 upgrade £15. Boxed retail copy £24.95. Boxed Windows 8 Server £175.50. No excuse not to have it. Have two editions of Windows 8 - Windows 8, which duplicates the current Windows 8 Pro, and Windows 8 Server, with extra functionality available as downloadable content from the store. The ultimate goal is to move to a model where Windows 8 is a modular system fed with downloadable content, so that over time £15 becomes £50, and £24.95 becomes £75, and £175.50 becomes... well, no upper limit for the server edition, the client is paying for it. DLC has been a smashing success in the computer gaming world, it can be a smashing success in the operating system world as well. You want to print a bunch of RAW files you've downloaded from your camera just by right-clicking on them and selecting send to printer? That'll be £4.95 please, for the Camera RAW Media Suite.

2. Own the Platform. Get on the phone to the world's motherboard manufacturers. The long-term goal is to come up with a standard UEFI BIOS interface that has a kind of cut-down Windows 8 start screen, that boots instantly and has basic internet functionality. Some motherboard manufacturers already make something similar - they call it a pre-OS environment - why not slap a Windows 8 Start Screen interface onto it? In fact this is something that Windows 8's Start Screen interface should have been written for in the first place. People wouldn't mind if it booted instantly and was sold explicitly as a taster of the "real" desktop. Gigabyte, Asus etc could sell motherboards with Windows 8 Start! Ready stickers on the packaging. The long-term goal is to either control or at least become the driving force behind the UEFI BIOS and thus the hardware. Microsoft seems to have started something like this already, with Secure Boot, which is more like the old Microsoft that we knew and loved.

3. Linux: Sleeping with the Enemy. Too far gone to destroy. Instead try to associate the free software movement with Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and the like, so that businessmen and system builders are suspicious. One classic tactic used by guilty-as-hell politicians is to accuse their accusers of the exact same crime. Make it so that free software advocates come across as hysterical clowns who can't be trusted. Hippies who hate the world of business, who want all information to be free - including your company's private information. Imply very loosely that if the choice is between the inevitability of having your data tapped by the NSA, e.g. Jack Bauer, Jason Bourne, James Bond, upstanding professionals, versus a bunch of badly-dressed Judean Popular People's Liberation Front of Judea types who will sell your stuff to The Guardian, you'd be mad not to go with the former. Okay, Linux might be secure; but Linux people... can you trust them? NB This approach would go down well in the US and the UK, where the population are pro-US; in France it would be a bad idea. France is a big market but on the other hand it costs money to translate Windows into French, besides which what's the point? Spanish is the language of the future, not French.

4. Embrace and Extend Steam. Get on the phone to Gabe Newell of Valve. Pretend to be his friend. Be humble, tell him that the Windows games store is okay but Steam is even better, and you want to make the two of them compatible with each other. So that people can buy games from either the Windows games store or Steam and have the game appear in both stores. And you'll share revenue and perhaps let Steam use XBox hardware for the Steambox. Microsoft will need to know a bit more about how Steam works, of course, and will need a seat on the board whenever decisions are made. The ultimate goal here is to latch on to Steam, add things to Steam, and eventually either gain control of Steam or push it over a cliff - the classic embrace, extend, exterminate model. Mr Newell is no dummy and this is unlikely to work, but it gives some of Microsoft's people something to do, and perhaps they might learn something.

5. Windows 8. Last and least, make it so that Microsoft's salesmen can tout Windows 8 without having to qualify their statements or lie. Take a look at Ubuntu, and try to make it so that the general public associate all of Linux with Ubuntu, because Ubuntu's interface is just as problematic as Windows 8 (look, they're fighting amongst themselves). As for Windows 8 itself, rejig it a bit. At installation the user is given the choice of booting either to the Start Screen or the desktop, with prominent instructions given on how to change this. If the user decides to boot to the desktop, the Start Screen will become a bit like the Windows Media Centre or full-screen Steam, e.g. a portal that desktop users dive into. Give a team of half a dozen developers a week to copy Classic Shell, but strip out most of its functionality. Make a big song and dance about this in the media. Make it look as if you're "de-Stalinising" Microsoft now that Steve Ballmer has left. Make it so that installing Windows 8.2 disables an existing installation of Classic Shell.

Linux on a ThinkPad X60: Gelignite Child, Ignite

Stellarium, running on Linux Mint 14, on a ThinkPad X60.

In the previous post I wrote about an ancient IBM ThinkPad 600X laptop, and at the end I decided to try out a bunch of Linux distributions on it. Not many of them worked, and I was worried that the post made Linux look bad in an unfair way. The 600X is very old and Linux has come a long way since 1999. Back then it was just starting to come to the attention of the mainstream, judging by this charming article from the New York Times from January of that year. I learn that Linux rhymes with Cynics, which is the first time I've heard that particular pronunciation. Of course, as any fule kno it is pronounced LAY-newzzzzz.

In 1999 Linux plus Apache was the web serving solution that ran well on everything; its enemy was Windows NT. Ordinary people weren't expected to use it as their desktop operating system although it was perfectly feasible to do so. StarOffice, the GIMP, and Netscape all existed back then, but Linux itself was difficult to get working properly. Nonetheless the Linux Men had a dream of full spectrum domination, and that eventually led us to the present day, and desktop-orientated Linux distributions such as Ubuntu and the others, although the press only cares for Ubuntu.

Also James Cameron's Titanic (1997) was made with Linux. He navigated to dev/usr/titanic and typed make and then insmod iceberg and the film was pretty much finished. There's a popular theory that Leonardo DiCaprio has only ever played one character in all of his films, and that "Jack Dawson" from Titanic faked his death and grew up to be Jay Gatsby of The Great Gatsby, who used his fortune to build an aeroplane business - but he started to lose his mind, and hallucinated that he was other people. Viewed in this way the depth of DiCaprio's vision is staggering to behold, the commitment. And what if "Leonaro DiCaprio" is himself a performance, what then? Are we all extras in his film, without realising it? Our actions controlled by an unseen director, according to a screenplay that was shown to us once, briefly, at the moment of our conception. Perhaps, in his final film, in the last scene of his final film, in the last moment DiCaprio will turn to us, the audience, and say one word. "Die".

The screen will cut to black and we will be alone in a darkened room, not knowing if our thoughts are the final eruptions of a dying mind or those of a man sitting in a darkened room. But, yes, it felt unfair to try out Linux on a ThinkPad 600X. It's a very old laptop. Now that I have a pile of Linux CDs sitting around, I decided to try them on a more modern machine, a ThinkPad X60. A 1.83ghz Core Duo from 2005. Built-in wi-fi, 12" screen, Intel 950 graphics chip - not a very good chip, but widely-supported. I use my X60 as a kind of high-powered netbook and it has aged well. In the eight years since it came out it has aged better than the 600X had aged in 2007, if you catch my drift.

One thing the X60 doesn't have is an optical drive, though. Optical drives are a throwback to a bygone age. Luckily I also have the X6 Ultrabase docking station, which has an Ultrabay slot for a DVD drive. The Ultrabay slot can also accommodate a small battery, and - best of all - a second hard drive:

The hard drive caddies are still manufactured, although unofficially - I got mine for £7 from Malaysia, and it works just fine. My other modern ThinkPad, an X61, has an internal SSD, and the Ultrabay caddy lets me add a conventional HDD so that I can store masses of data.

As you might expect, the X60 has no problem with modern Ubuntu distributions. Here it is running the Xubuntu 12.04 live CD:

Peppermint 3 booted to the Live CD environment just fine, but Lubuntu threw up a cryptic "system problem detected" error, which is the kind of thing that gives Linux a bad name. I remember the first time I tried Ubuntu; it installed and seemed to work, but couldn't detect my widescreen monitor unless I edited xorg.conf. The same people who have no problem with this mock Windows 8 because the shutdown button is slightly less obvious.

After taking out the Lubuntu CD and smashing it, something hit me - not fragments of the CD, but an idea. The X60 is modern enough to boot from a USB stick, so why am I bothering with CDs? Why? So, with the help of the handy Universal USB Installer I burned... wrote Linux Mint 14 to a USB stick and stuck it in. Stuck it right in. Good and proper.

Data was once stored on physical objects. Here are some of them. Each new generation was smaller but held far more data. Data storage is now insubstantial but infinitely huge.

Let's see if I can install Linux Mint 14 alongside Windows 8. There was a time when the thought of setting up a machine to dual boot with Linux and Windows did not appeal to me, and was not something I would on a whim. But times have changed. I could in theory just get rid of Windows 8, but I paid for it and it works. It has been blamed for causing the current PC market slump, but I can live with it. It's like a bicycle-mad friend who occasionally rabbits on about veganism, you learn to ignore the bits you don't like.

The X60 predates Secure Boot and uses an old-fashioned BIOS. Rather than install Linux Mint onto the built-in hard drive, I decided to put it on the second drive, in the drive caddy. I suppose this way I could install Linux onto several small hard drives, and just swap caddies when I want to swap distributions. Rather than mess around with partitions I just wiped the drive and used it wholesale. The installation was surprisingly, boringly automatic.

You know what I think derailed The Future Sound of London's commercial momentum? Obviously FSOL had something to do with it, with their unwillingness or inability to play live, or develop a cult of personality, or bring in a lady singer. But I blame ISDN, and three-for-two offers. Three-for-two offers were a staple of the UK retail scene during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Some shops, notably Waterstones, based their retail strategy on 3-for-2. Wind back to 1996, and fans of WipeOut 2097 associated FSOL with this and this:

That kind of milkshake brought all the boys to the yard, which in this case was the local HMV, where they picked up The Prodigy Experience that they had been meaning to buy for ages but hadn't bothered because they had most of it on the singles, plus a second album, and ISDN. Instead of spooky up-tempo dance music the noise that came out of the speakers was slow and mean. It's a great album and I love it to bits, but it wasn't the kind of thing likely to hook the kids. Their new album, Dead Cities, would have been a much better choice, but it wasn't a 3-for-2 because it was new. And FSOL stopped after that. By the time their next album came out, in 2002, FSOL wasn't FSOL any more, and the mainstream had closed its mind to new sounds.

But, Linux Mint. It installs and sets up grub, which boots to Windows 8 without a hitch:

Phew. It boots to Linux Mint as well, at which point it asks to install nigh-on 250mb of updates. After installing these and rebooting the OS takes up around 3.6gb:

To be honest, I don't believe for a moment that the designers enjoyed designing Linux Mint. It was probably enormously hard work for no reward, with a tonne of wasted effort, political infighting etc. Like so many hobbies, it relied on the hobbyists having fairly lucrative day jobs. And one day they will wake up and realise that they were shafted by people who did no work at all, but the next generation of enthusiastic fools won't want to know. Let them learn to sink by themselves.

Linux Mint 14, running in a dual-boot configuration with Windows 8, on a ThinkPad X60, using a second hard drive plugged into the docking station.

Why did I photograph the screen, instead of taking screen captures? 'cause it looks more real, that's why. The obvious limitation with this setup is that I can't use Linux Mint on the road unless I take the docking station, which turns my X60 into a very large subnotebook.

Now, let's see what happens when I remove the X60 from the docking station and try booting it up. It'll either work, or it won't work. (unplugs docking station, turns machine on) It doesn't work. Yikes. Nasty message, command prompt. BUT the passive-aggressive, utterly obnoxious, hate-filled (gritted teeth) and extremely helpful and freely giving Linux community has a solution, courtesy of a chap called Mr Witch in this post here. It involves using Boot-Repair, and telling it that the removable drive is in fact a removable drive.

Now, with the machine unplugged from the docking station, it boots straight into Windows 8. Yay! With the machine attached to the docking station, it... boots straight into Windows 8. Rats. But what if I change the boot order? Ah, that does the trick, Boot-Repair has presumably shifted Grub onto the removable disc. (checks) Indeed it has. When I boot from the internal drive I get Windows 8, when I boot from the external drive I get the Grub menu - which boots Linux Mint or Windows 8 depending on which one I choose. Now everything is groovy. ~~~shoa, I'm fukcin, in the words of Brandon Vedas. Switching boot devices temporarily is easy, but less elegant than booting from a menu, but hey. Life is less elegant than booting from a menu.

Ultimately, if you can get hold of a cheap used X61 or similar with the hard drive stripped out - which is very common with used ThinkPads, because they were business machines - and you have a small hard drive lying around, Linux Mint would be a very good way of getting a cheap, usable laptop. The internal caddy (e.g. the rubber bumpers and metal cradle that holds the internal hard drive) costs about £5 from eBay. Shorn of the ideology it makes very little sense to dual-boot it with Windows 8 if you only use the machine as a glorified netbook; Linux might be more flexible under the hood, but ultimately Firefox is Firefox. And Photoshop is Photoshop (and The GIMP is not).

Of course, Linux shorn of the ideology is like rhubarb crumble without the rhubarb. It's still edible, but it's no longer rhubarb crumble. It's just crumble.

EDIT: And shortly after writing the above, Linux Mint 15 came out. The team seems to have settled on Cinnamon and MATE as window managers, without offering KDE and XFCE as official options. I tried the Cinnamon version and it installed just as easily as Mint 14, although in the end I wasn't too fond of Cinnamon. Too flashy. It can be ditched in favour of KDE easily enough, but I want to explore new lands before I plant seeds in the soil around me. Next I tried the Debian Live CD, which booted in double-quick time but didn't detect the X60's wi-fi card. Then Lubuntu, which ran into an error during installation and refused to go any further. And then finally Linux Mint 13, the most recent long-term support version of Mint, which installed without a hitch. What happens next? I will gradually use it less and less, and then I'll forget my root password, and then I'll wipe it with something or forget about it.

Installing an SSD into an old ThinkPad X61

A while back I installed a Solid State Drive (SSD) into my old ThinkPad X60, and although the machine was noticeably snappier I wasn't convinced that it made sense. The X60 has a SATA I bus, which hobbles the SSD. Luckily I also have an X61, which is generally faster and has SATA II. After swapping the drive and cloning the X61, here's what it's like:


Music by myself there. The X61 was launched in 2007, and introduced the 64-bit-capable Core II Duo to the ultraportable ThinkPad range. The Core II Duo is one of the classic modern CPUs and overshadowed the short-lived, original, 32-bit-only Core Duo. As of 2013 a Core II Duo machine with sufficient memory and a good graphics card is good enough for almost any purpose, which might be one of the reasons why the PC market is rapidly being overhauled by the tablet market; there's no compelling reason for Mr Joe Average to junk his perfectly-functional five-year-old PC in favour of a new machine that does the same stuff, but fractionally quicker.

Officially the X61 had 150mb/s SATA I only, but on a technical level it was fully compatible with 300mb/s SATA II, it's just that for some reason Lenovo decided to disable it in the BIOS. It can be turned back on, but the procedure isn't for the faint of heart; you have to install a custom BIOS. In theory this is just a matter of downloading the file, clicking on the installer, and waiting, but as with anything involving flashing the BIOS there is the potential for great harm if (say) a nuclear explosion in the upper atmosphere temporarily cuts the power.

Speed-wise Crystal Disk Mark says that the 840 reads at 251mb/s, which at least means that the custom BIOS works. I would really need to run something that involves reading one large chunk of sequential data to truly appreciate the SSD's benefit, but operationally the X61 is (as with the X60) distinctly snappier. It's not so apparent from the video, but there's less jerkiness, fewer pauses. The experience of using the machine feels smoother. Economically the upgrade is still iffy - X61s are limited by their screens, which can't easily be replaced or upgraded.

It has to be said that SSDs do not, on a rational level, make economic sense for the typical consumer or individual, at least as a need rather than a want. They're polish. On a financial level their depreciation is awful, because of their finite lifespan and the possibility that the previous owner used his SSD to feed a 24/7 torrent server. As a consequence I think of an SSD as something that ends up wedded to its host unto death, in which case you might as well marry it to the best machine you can afford.

Still, the X61 meets my needs for the time being and so the SSD can stay inside it. 'twould be interesting to stick it in my Asus 1005HA netbook - netbooks were harbingers of the SSD revolution, before they grew fat - but it still has XP on it, which is trickier to configure for SSDs.

Boxout: Ten Three-Letter Abbrevations that begin with SS
 
1. Super-Sonic Transport (SST)
2. Sigue Sigue Sputnik (SSS)
3. SSS (I'm a snake)
4. SSSSSSSSSS
5. 55555555555
6. S5S5S5S5S5
7. SSF (Soup? So Fine)
8. SSN (Succullent, Silky Nougat)
9. SSK (Stinky Submarine Kid)
10. SSL (Spatula, Spoon, Nife)

For some variety, in the next post I will try installing an SSD into (a) an old pair of boots (b) some hot cross buns (c) former head of the UN Kofi Annan (d) Europa, mysterious and possibly life-harbouring moon of Jupiter. Attempt no landings there.

Absorb / Emit

More music, as before performed live with Audiomulch running on a Thinkpad X61 (this time with Windows 8). 180bpm.

Here's a very simple earlier version, with a short film involving some grapes and lemonade:

Turbine II

Whilst on holiday I had a chance to radically overhaul Turbine, and add more beats, louder ones. In that post I toyed with the idea of using Hellflower St Germain as my rock name. This month I've come up with some alternative names which I will present after the music:



Alternative "Rock" Names for Ashley Pomeroy (Me)
1. Kangaroospine
2. Ramshoal Andantier (which I used a very long time ago)
3. Fragment of Lice
4. Transport Participation Box
5. Quoup
6. Bridge of Pies

Number five is my Warp Records name. As before, the track was performed live-in-the-studio with Audiomulch running on a Thinkpad X61. The matrix looks like this, shown here running with an external monitor:

If you trace the contraptions you can see how it works, and how Audiomulch works. On the left, for example, you can see LoopPlayer1, which is playing the bassline that begins at 1:25. The bassline is fed into SupaTrigga, which cuts it into little pieces and regurgitates it into Glitch, which cuts it into little pieces again. Then it goes through DigiGrunge, which dirties it up, and then it passes through a flanger, which makes it go whoosh. Thence to the mixer and out into the physical world through a compressor. The process of making music with Audiomulch is almost exactly the same as the process of turning cattle into spam, or worms into birdfood.

As you can see, even with an external monitor the display is still cramped. Like most laptops the X61 only supports a maximum of one external display, although there are ways to get around this. Matrox makes a device called DualHead2Go, which splits the external display across two monitors - it fools the computer into thinking that it's connected to one very external large display - and a company called DisplayLink makes a multi-monitor USB hub. Does it work? I don't know. But this man does. Yikes! Matrox's DualHeadEtc is very popular but the X61 only supports a maximum resolution of 2048x1536, which is plenty for one screen but not very much for two. This is one of the few things that dates the X61 (that and the old-fashioned VGA connector) but I still love it. I'm going to give it a hug right now.

(hugs laptop)

Ouch! It's sharp. And suddenly I've turned into Mark Prindle again.