OpenSource Connections
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Normally Id buy a laptop online or snipe one off eBay. But I needed one quick. So off to Best Buy with Scott Stults. A quick evaluation reveals a disappointing lack of choice, despite over 30 models on display. Nonetheless I find a Toshiba A215-S6816 with good specs for the price. For the record – AMD Turion x64 2.2 GHz, 3GB memory, 250 GB hard drive, and some other built in devices. All controlled by Vista Home Edition Premium.
Later that night…..
OK time to get this machine ready for work. First boot. Lordy, theres 30+ icons on desktop and the systray is four inches wide. Its a shame to because I love a fresh OS install. I hate the practice, but the desktop was more like billboard than a work surface. Pongo, Napster, et. al. had trial versions preinstalled. Even worse, most of them started during startup. Thanks Best Buy. Time to get my uninstall on. Holy smokes, whats the User Access Control? Am I not an administrator of this machine. I can see why Apple makes fun of this. I turn it off, but every so often I get a reminder that I turned it off. The first uninstall goes bad, it fails halfway through. Now every reboot takes longer because the half installed program cant start and Vista wants to fix it. Crimony.
OK lets get on my network. Heres where Vista gets freaky. First off my WEP key isnt working. Am I entering it wrong? Its possible since its 26 characters long. OK, Ill plug in some cat5, browse to the 192.168.0.1 and cut & paste the key. Briefly Vista recognizes both connections, but then they both die. I unplug the LAN line, look the wireless connection has found the access point again. WEP key still not working. On another machine I burn the WEP key to CD and sneaker-net it to the laptop. Still no workie. Inexplicably, on the umpteenth try it does work. So Ive got a wireless connection. Or do I? Basically the wireless connection drops every 10 minutes or so. Reconnecting means entering the WEP key again and again and again. Sometimes the WEP key works on the first try, sometimes I have to cut & paste it ten times. And neither connection works when cat5 is plugged in.
Back to XP…..
I call Scott, he gives me the latitude to change the OS. I hop on one of my home machines to start collecting XP drivers for the laptop. Strange, Toshibas website only list Vista drivers for this machine. Keep digging. I discover this laptop is sold as a Toshiba, Best Buy and Vista exclusive, i.e. sold only at Best Buy and only with Vista Home Edition Premium. All your base are belong to us. Youd think a machine designated as such would work superbly with Vista. I start reading the forums. Im not alone. As I suspected, in Europe the same machine is sold, but with a different model number, but the same exact chipsets. Bingo. The Toshiba Europe website has all the drivers I need. Well almost, my model has a different video card. Further forum reading leads me to Ruud Ketelaars who wrote Modder.Net. Which cleverly modifies the existing Vista drivers to work with XP. So I install the Vista video drivers and modify them with Modder.net. Victory.
I was worried that my wireless networking troubles were hardware related. But the wireless connection performs flawlessly with XP.
The laptop is now what I was hoping for, quick boot, zippy performance, sharp display….