Quick Note

Just a quick note that I've finally got the Acer Aspire laptop all battery'd up and seemingly working fine.  I'm writing on it now, and this is its first untethered run on the first charge of the fresh battery.  So far, the system is indicating nearly 3 hours life on this battery.  (Though I'm not really sure if it's calibrated properly or not.  We'll see after a few discharge cycles.)

(Hmmm...  As I said...  Not sure about the calibration.  I did a complete boot on the battery, and then checked email and browsed a bit.  The monitor is showing it at 92%, with over 3 hours...  Oooo-kay...)

This little system, like its big tower brother, is rather embarrassing to me.  Way back when it was brand new, I really didn't pay attention to all the nice features.  This is darned nice laptop with a potent processor, very comfortable keyboard, and very functional scrolling touchpad.  I simply never paid any attention to all that.  Pure ignorance on my part.

Sad statement of how we take for granted, and don't appreciate what we have.

In other news, I tried to do some Linux work with the old Panasonic CF-29.  Got so far as managing to get "Wary Puppy" up and running.  (The Pentium M chip doesn't do PAE, so I was limited to what I could try.)  However, I didn't get any further, as it became apparent that there were problems with the Matsushita optical drive.  Tried to live boot a copy of Xubuntu 12.04, but no go...  I'm not sure if it's a physical problem with the drive, or a driver issue.  Whatever, the computer no longer sees the drive.  And I'm seeing the same boot-up problems I saw on it before, where the "MP" light comes on, and the system takes forever to boot up.

Oh well...

Thought about trying to work on the Thinkpad R40 for a bit, but decided better on it.  (Though I am still thinking of stealing that 256 MB RAM stick out of it, and seeing if I can up the memory on the A31.  That, and a Puppy install there, would be great.  Or maybe trying to see if AntiX actually lives up to its "works on older computers" hype...)

I have a feeling I'm going to get into that "best laid plans" territory again.  We'll see...