laptops
After a frustrating time during the snow when my hard disk in my thinkpad crashed big style I have successfully moved to an ubuntu build with a vmware for those windows based applications I need to use and demo. That week started with snow thus no access to the office, but with the beauty of spare technology I was able to swap the duff drive with the one from my original Macbook that is not being used being only 80GB 
With my Macbook Pro I connected back to the office and downloaded the VPN software, whilst downloading the standard build in VMware format and the Ubuntu Karmic Koala 64bit. Within a day I was back up running with the exception of some quirks with the vpn build needed for access to work, but this was only a minor issue as I could still connect via the vmware image.
It was interesting when I rang IBM support to get the old drive sorted on warranty. Basically they wouldn’t except a linux disk test error message stating exactly how many bad sectors I had, instead they insisted that I download a Dr PC window version tester to test the disk that only reported a vague disk error message. This proved a challenge as I had to borrow a windows PC to burn the bootable CD to test the disk, great fun, what if I didn’t have access to a window PC. When I rang back with the error code the agent was only interested that I had a disk error message to satisfy his requirements to send out a new disk. This turned up the following Tuesday so it was a good job I had that spare otherwise with the snow I would have to use the Macbook…
Lets hope this disk can last more than 8 months…….
Tags: 64bit, Laptop, linux, MacBook, MacBook Pro, Ubuntu, VMWare, vpn, Windows
