Old laptop and internet help needed

[TexasBrandon]

Yep, that's why I'm agreeing.

 

[x12aesq]

Ubuntu

https://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop

Just sayin'

 

[Eli]

So I acquired an older dell lap top running windows XP.

I've got it showing it has internet connection on wired or wireless, both with good connectivity however I cannot access the internet (browser or to update programs)

Any ideas? It's default browser is IE which will be the first thing I change and I need to update the antivirus.

Firewall is off and for whatever reason even system restore won't work because of the issue.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Do you need 'Xpect Problems'? If not, install this: https://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop
I've used Linux for desktops for over a decade now, it's easy and generally faster than anything M$ produces. And FREE!
If you really want to get daring, you can install Debian (I'd start with the LXDE desktop) from here: http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/current/multi-arch/

Eli

 

[benenglish]

Ubuntu

I second that. Strongly.

 

[Darkpriest667]

As long as all you do is browse the internet I will agree with the linux brigade =)

 

[benenglish]

As long as all you do is browse the internet I will agree with the linux brigade =)

I do quite a lot more than browse the internet but haven't seriously used anything but Linux in almost a decade. For most users and 95%+ of all the tasks they do (especially when trying to resurrect an XP-era laptop) Linux is usually the easy, convenient, reliable way to get stuff done.

For folks in that last couple of percent who need a particular bit of software to do some non-mainstream task, well, they already know what they need and won't be trying to do it on "an old Dell laptop" that they just "acquired".

 

[Darkpriest667]

I do quite a lot more than browse the internet but haven't seriously used anything but Linux in almost a decade. For most users and 95%+ of all the tasks they do (especially when trying to resurrect an XP-era laptop) Linux is usually the easy, convenient, reliable way to get stuff done.

For folks in that last couple of percent who need a particular bit of software to do some non-mainstream task, well, they already know what they need and won't be trying to do it on "an old Dell laptop" that they just "acquired".

Agreed, I do a lot of gaming and unfortunately Nvidia gaming drivers and some sound cards I use have never worked correctly on any linux distro.... Mint wasn't good for it either which was my last hope.

I tried writing a driver on Ubuntu 10.10 but gave up because I was becoming increasingly frustrated with the community, which is the only helpdesk you get.

With my windows 10 enterprise copy I call Microsoft and they give me support 24/7 over the phone straight from Redmond.


Again, I'm not most users, but prosumers absolutely have to use Windows until Linux steps up their support game. you can get prosumer support with Ubuntu but it will cost you 300 a year, with Red Hat last I checked, and it was probably 4 years ago, it was 1000 a year for prosumer support.


I don't have time to go into the console these days and write drivers for my whacky hardware configurations. I may be going to work for Dell (getting out of education seems more likely) and working on their Linux team to start setting up consumer laptops for Linux, but the long hard road of consumer support could end up costing EMC Dell 100,000,000 dollars. The infrastructure for this stuff ain't cheap.

 

[benenglish]

...prosumers absolutely have to use Windows until Linux steps up their support game. ... I don't have time to go into the console these days and write drivers for my whacky hardware configurations. ...

Excellent points.

As a Linux fanboi, I choose my hardware only after confirming that it works with my OS. I've failed to do that in the past and had to write more crap in a terminal than I ever care to repeat. With that experience, I can certainly agree that if you want to pick "whacky", out-of-the-mainstream hardware and expect your software to work, Windows is better. Personally, I rely on way-back-from-the-bleeding-edge hardware, confirm that my Linux can talk to it, and then buy it.

Picking the right tools for the job may mean you use Linux, Windows, BSD, SCO OSR (the old sysadmin in me misses those days), or even (shudder!) something from Apple.

But for general use in some old hardware someone has managed to acquire, I say throw in an Ubuntu LiveCD and see if it will make everything work. If it tests out just go ahead and install it.

 

[Darkpriest667]

Excellent points.

As a Linux fanboi, I choose my hardware only after confirming that it works with my OS. I've failed to do that in the past and had to write more crap in a terminal than I ever care to repeat. With that experience, I can certainly agree that if you want to pick "whacky", out-of-the-mainstream hardware and expect your software to work, Windows is better. Personally, I rely on way-back-from-the-bleeding-edge hardware, confirm that my Linux can talk to it, and then buy it.

Picking the right tools for the job may mean you use Linux, Windows, BSD, SCO OSR (the old sysadmin in me misses those days), or even (shudder!) something from Apple.

But for general use in some old hardware someone has managed to acquire, I say throw in an Ubuntu LiveCD and see if it will make everything work. If it tests out just go ahead and install it.

CD? you monster, we use USB boot drives now :-p

 

[Brains]

Say what you will, but I love my Macs. And I spend a *lot* of time in Terminal.

 

[benenglish]

Say what you will, but I love my Macs. And I spend a *lot* of time in Terminal.

You are a man among men.

To be mostly serious, I actually like to spend some time on the command line. (Lord knows, when I learned "cat" and how to understand and pipe stdout, the heavens opened and I swear I could hear the choir.) At one point in my life I even tried to replace my everyday computer with one running INX, a menu-driven/no-gui linux that routinely dumps the user into a terminal. I didn't last a week but if I were forced to use it, I'd adapt. The terminal is power and I salute you, O Powerful One.

PS - To be entirely serious, every OS has its place. People use what they like and/or need and I'm never qualified to tell people to change their ways. But I sure like to have fun with this stuff.

 

[Brains]

Definitely, it all depends on your use cases. Mine are I guess a bit specialized; I do a lot of software dev. and sysadmin stuff. Like this morning, I needed to turn some cheap used NetApp drives I got off eBay into usable disk for my Dell server at the house. The NetApp SAS disks are formatted with 520byte sectors vs the std. 512byte sectors, so the RAID controller showed them as failed. There's no GUI to make the change, but it involved nothing more than booting the server from an Ubuntu LiveCD, downloading and compiling a little open source C utility to send the SCSI commands to the drives, running said utility and waiting for the drives to reformat themselves.