A while ago I was given a perfect condition Acer laptop. Nothing that highly spec’d but still modern and perfectly fine for Windows XP.

Perhaps some back story is needed. A friend of mine’s dad was having some issues with his laptop. She called me and I spoke to him. I helped him out with a few problems from anti virus not working to spyware and malware getting onto his system. All just phonecalls and me typing suggestions. Nothing that special, the sort of thing I do all the time. A month or so ago said friend got in contact to say the laptop issues were over, he had bought a new laptop. Fair enough, good for him. Then I was asked if I would like it. As far as he was concerned it didn’t work and had stability issues. I explained I didn’t really need it and all I would do if I could get it working would be install XP on it and leave it until someone’s computer breaks and hand it to them to keep them going.

Week later it turned up in Brighton in a huge box via the post. I duly thanked him and set about having a look at it. It seemed too good to be true. It was in mint condition, I mean, it looked new. I broke out my XP disk and set about installing XP pro on it. I got it running in an hour, installed the drivers. All seemed to be going well. Then I put it down, leaving it on for an hour or so and came back to. It refused to take any input. Nothing from the keyboard or the mouse. It was clearly all running but just not responding. I reset and left it again and the same happened.

Clearly it had some stability issues. It didn’t seem to be getting too hot, I took it apart and dusted it out just in case. Still the same thing happened. OK, so now I booted it up into the BIOS and left it running for a few hours. No lockups, none at all. OK, maybe it was just Windows.

Then I installed Ubuntu Linux, then as before, left it running a few hours and checked up on it. All just fine.

OK, so clearly not hardware. Then I remembered that when I first had issues with it under Windows I had the drivers all installed. Maybe one of those was the issues. So, today I finally got around to trying out Windows without the drivers. Well, I say I got around to try that, I started the install, then about three quarters of the way in it stopped accepting inputs. Surly It can’t be just Windows?

I have just downloaded and am now installing Ubuntu Studio to see what it makes of that. I have always wanted to play with this distribution anyway.

Assuming this works (which I expect it will) then it would seem I am left with an anti Windows laptop with a “designed for Windows XP” sticker on it. Irony anyone?