Everyday Thaumaturgy
(It's a Miracle If I Get Anything Done Around Here)
a blog by William S. Statler

Laptop computer renovation, Part 1

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 20:00:00 PST

We bought a laptop computer (Toshiba Satellite P25-S477) way back in September of 2003. Nice little machine with a wide screen and an adequately-powerful 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 processor, and Windows XP Professional.

We're not using it much these days, because I assembled "shoebox" desktop computers running Ubuntu Linux for my wife and myself. But I still need one Windows system for running a few programs. Unfortunately, as seems to be common for aging Windows systems, this one has accumulated so many little software problems that it's hard to run it for more than an hour without rebooting.

So this was an ideal excuse to buy it a brand-new (and much larger) hard drive, and a lot more memory, and just re-install Windows XP from scratch. And while I'm at it, make it a dual-boot system and install Ubuntu too.

I'm not planning to blog every little technical detail of this project. I'll be concentrating on general principles of how I'm tackling the project, plus bits of useful info that might be generally applicable to any similar computer upgrade.

Anyway, here's the basic plan:

• Update the BIOS.
• Replace the current 512 MB memory with 2 GB of new memory.
• Replace the current 40 GB hard drive with a new 120 GB drive.
• Install Windows XP on the first partition of the drive, and update it with Service Pack 3.
• Install Ubuntu Linux on partitions 2, 3, and 4 (the "/" root directory, /home, and the swap partition, respectively).
• And the fun part: The Linux /home partition will be encrypted. On the Windows side, install compatible encryption software plus a driver to read/write the Linux ext3 filesystem. Then the same partition will serve as both the encrypted Linux /home and the encrypted Windows E:\ drive. Nifty, huh?

It might even work.

Onward to Part 2

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