SHA-ZAM!! (?!?)

Another one of "those" days...  Good, bad, ugly, and highly apathetic, all rolled into one...

Might as well get it out of the way.  The new "Mystery" machine arrived today.  And, no, it didn't have anything to do with Scooby-Doo...  (I know...  Bad... Bad...)

I picked up a clunker Thinkpad X60s.  The thin, just shy of netbook (but a lot better) machine.  It's nice, has seen some abuse, but is quite functional.  The seller reinstalled WinXP on it, a clean install back to factory specs, which is OK, for the time being.  The system came with no battery installed, but joyously, the battery I ordered for it came today as well.  It's an 8 cell model, with an odd blanking plate I had to attach before installing the battery.  Strange...

The bad, ugly, and apathetic came along, though.  I also got another battery today, supposedly the battery for the T61.  Happy as all get out, I got the '61 out and got ready to install...

And then the problems started:  The battery obviously wouldn't fit.  A quick exam showed it was a close-but-no-cigar mismatch in the shape of the battery.  A bit of irked fiddling showed that I had a T60 battery, not a T61.

OK, lemon to lemonade.  I got the T60 out and fitted the new battery in.

And the system wouldn't recognize it.  The lemons got really sour...

I believe, at that point, that I discovered some problems with my soul.  Deep breath.  Go on.

So, I set the T60 aside, made sure the old battery was back in the T61.  Emailed the seller, asking about doing a swap for a proper battery (I'll probably just end up returning it for a refund)

Deep breath.  Go on.

The X60s seems to be doing fine, though.  Battery charged up quite nice (showing about 3.5 hours on it).  Not bad.

Even better, I found the old external USB DVD drive from one of the old netbooks I had.  And it works quite divinely with the X60s.  So...

Deep breath...

Do you know that you can't do a WUBI install of Lubuntu without doing a bunch of jiggerypokery that I just really don't feel like doing..? 

Now, if I want to live boot from the CD, that's fine.  If I want to partition the hard drive and install Lubuntu alongside Windows, that's great.  If I want to wipe the drive and install Lubuntu solo, that ecstatic.  However, I can't seem to find an effortless way to install Lubuntu inside Windows, so that I can nuke it in an emergency...  My essential laziness is deeply affronted.

Granted, I'm probably just going to nuke XP eventually, and install some variant of the Ubuntu family.  But, I just don't want to do that right now...  Not sure why, but...

Think I'm just going to ramble on over to YouTube and see how the X60s here handles video.  Maybe watch some CNet/Molly Wood's videos to cheer myself up.

Or depress the hell out of myself.  For obvious reasons...