Converting your old PC into something useful again!

What are you talking about? I hear you ask.

 

My personal example is a Dell Inspiron N5050-5436 from about 2012. It happens to have belonged to my mother-in-law.

 

She told me, do something with the Dell, “before I kill it, or someone!” and being the kind and considerate gentleman that I am, I sat down and thought, hmm, what can I do to get this ole Dell productive again?

 

I thought:

• I can go retro and install XP on it, but, hmm, viruses; spyware, malware etc., nope; very, very bad plan, ole boy.
• I can go with a linux distro! But then again, I know very little about linux, and I cannot be bothered to go and do the research, so again, nope.
• My last idea was to install Chromium on it, and I thought, how would you do such a thing?

 

So, how do you install Chromium on a laptop, and what do you have?

 

So after I decided to install Chromium on the Dell, I was wondering how to go about this thing. I decided to employ my best friend Google and search for “How to install chromium on pc”.

 

Unsurprisingly, results were plentiful! I looked at quite a few, and in many of them the name Cloudready popped up, over, and over again.

 

Thus, I decided to go take a look at the Cloudready website and thought, hmm, let’s give this a go.

 

Instructions on the website is about as clear as you can get, and also very easy to follow. Thus, the Dell Inspiron Chromebook was born.

 

As a blind individual you will find very limited info on Chrome OS, and this is for a very simple reason. It is the simplest usable system I’ve ever worked with. I would go so far as to say it is beautiful in its simplicity.

 

In years passed, Chrome OS was basically a glorified, bootable web browser, but those days are gone. There are very few things I haven’t found a way to do, the most notable, playing audio games, but that is not really my interest anyway, so I can’t really give a damn.

 

So, what is the old PC good fore now?

 

I think the most important thing to the blind community is communication, and one of the most important tools for this is Skype.

 

There is actually an extension which would launch the Skype Web App, and, yes, this is fully accessible. It does not quite work in the way you may be used to, but if you have used the new Windows 10 version, you would be okay.

 

Google Docs, Googles word processor reminds me in form very much of Word 2003, no ribbon menus!!! It is easy to use. In Chrome OS you use it like you would’ve done Word 2003, Alt to get to the menus and all.

 

I would expect Sheets and Slides to be similar in function to their Office counterparts.

 

Chromevox as a screen reader in Chrome, the browser comes up short, but in Chrome OS where it is the only option, it shines. It does exactly what you need it to do, exactly when you need it.

 

My conclusions?

 

I will not do this, but if I have to, I could quite happily do everything I need to in Chrome OS.

 

It is something I would recommend you give a shot if you are tired of antiVirus software, Windows updating your computer when you don’t want it to, overly expensive screen readers not doing the job any more, or even if you just have a bloody old Computer, and, yes, this will work on a Mac to.

Returning from a reborn MacBook pro

After an unbelievably long absence, I would suppose, mostly caused by laziness, but also in part by a very slow and sluggish MacBook; I have returned.

Now you may ask, how? The answer is actually rather simple. A bit of money and elbow grease.

 

If you read the Apple support pages, you will find that the mid 2012 MacBook Pro that I own, is user upgradable.

 

They claim that users should only upgrade the RAM. However, once you open the unit, what lies before your eyes? Why! The hard drive; and what do we do with slow hard drives? Rather obvious, we replace them.

Now, you may ask, why are you so gleeful? I suspect, the answer to that is rather obvious in retrospect.

 

I took my stock standard mid 2012 MacBook Pro with 4 GB ram and 5400 RPM HD, and revived it with 16 GB of RAM, even though Apple claim only up to eight will work and eight 240 GB SSD drive.

 

Now before you think, hey! Let's go to the shop, get ram an SSD and do it, be aware of several factors.

 

1. , The newest MacBook Pro that can be easily upgraded in this fashion is the mid 2012 MacBook Pro. None of the retina models is very user upgradable, in fact, you can only upgrade the storage as far as I can tell. What you buy, is mostly what you are stuck with. Why do you think, Apple still sells the mid 2012 MacBook Pro?

 

2. Different models of MacBook Pro uses different frequencies DDR3 ram. An example of this, the mid 2012 MacBook Pro uses 1600 MHz DDR3 ram. Other models uses different frequencies. I do not know these off the top of my head though. There are several excellent references online regarding this matter.

 

3. Do not try and replace only one of your ram sticks!!! If you do, you may have more trouble than you had before the "upgrade." There are technical reasons for this, which I will not go into at this point. If you wish to know more, look it up. Also, do not mix and match RAM brands. If you wish to do so, make sure the timing on both RAM sticks are the same, for if they are not, nothing good will happen.

 

4. Make sure you have a back up of your Mac available!!! This is critical!!!

I would personally make a clone using something like carbon copy cloner because that clone is bootable. Very useful in later stages of your upgrade.

 

Okay smarty-pants, what do I need to do this?

 

To open the unit, you need a 00 Philips screwdriver. There are 10 screws around the edge of the bottom plate of your MacBook Pro. These are the smallest screws I have personally ever dealt with. Please make sure that you have a place two keep these safe. Three of them are longer than the others, those are the three from the back right corner of your Mac, working along the back edge.

To replace the ram once inside the unit, you do not need any tools.

 

There are several excellent videos on YouTube demonstrating the procedure.

 

To replace the hard drive, you need an extra tool, which is a T6 screwdriver. I will not attempt to explain how this is done, go see on YouTube. Once again, they are excellent videos on the topic.

 

So, what now? Now, I hope you did the sensible thing, and used an app such as carbon copy cloner to create a bootable back up of your Mac. If you didn't, this is going to become very tedious very quickly. If, however you did, this is going to be a snap.

 

Once you've booted into your backup drive, go and format your new SSD drive in the disk utility. The defaults should work, I named my new drive Macintosh SSD, the format should be "Mac OS X extended journal" with the partition scheam GUID.

 

Now, clone your backup to your new SSD and shut down your mac.

Remove the external drive and hit the power button. It should be about 45 seconds, and voilà, you basically have a brand-new Mac. Mine was slow and noticeably old before the upgrade, now it is snappier than it was when I bought it in early 2013.

If you decide to go ahead, please do your research, a Mac is expensive, and the parts you will need is not cheap either.

New in mavericks, pages, etc.

As we all know by now, we had major updates since 22 October 2013.

 

Firstly, we had Mavericks coming out of developer preview to the public. What we did not expect however, is the fact that Mavericks can be downloaded for free.

 

We also have updates to the iWork's and the iLife suites.

 

I am still trying to get my head around pages, but what I have seen thus far has me almost convinced that Office for the Mac user Might just become obsolete. The interface has been simplified to such an extent that it is almost unreal. The fact that MS-word documents is now completely usable is an incredible bonus. Unfortunately, there are some issues regarding RTF files, not sure if it is a bug, or deliberate in design yet.

 

I have not played with Numbers at all, for I have no need for it. But what I have seen online looks promising. The same is unfortunately true for Keynote.

 

Mavericks, as expected, except of course for the price. My only bitch with it, is the horrible monstrosity they pretended to call iBooks. I really have no idea what they thought when they put that thing together. There is absolutely no structure. My personal feelings regarding it is too either scrap it completely, or to get their act together and fix it ASAP. I personally hope they get their act together. 

 

You can contact me by referring back to my first blog post, "introducing myself".

My rather interesting boot camp experience

This is what I would consider to be something not to be dumb on a regular basis, (consider this a friendly warning.)

 

Not so very long ago, I decided that there are some things that was available in windows that I just cannot live without. Now I can hear you Mac lovers scream indignantly, what the hell does windows have that you cannot get on a Mac! Quite a few things, is my answer. Yes, I am also a big fan of Apple computers, but I also think that I am mature enough to know where to draw the line.

 

For one thing, even though this is despicable, Microsoft in their infinite wisdom decided not to make MS office accessible for the Mac. I know, some people would say that you do not need office, but you are wrong. Unfortunately over the last decade or so Microsoft office became the industry-standard for word processing, spreadsheets and presentation. I know that Apple has iWorks, but unfortunately the currently available Version of iWork's software, does not play nice with the newer versions of office. We are currently waiting for updates from Apple for the iWorks suite, but I have not seen anything regarding this as of yet. This is not the only reason why I installed windows on my Mac, yeah I know, blasphemous is it not? I am also fond of playing computer games. In my case, obviously audio games or other accessible games. Unfortunately for us gamer freaks, the available accessible games for the Mac are very few and even more difficult to get a hold off if you are not in the US. For some reason, very few of the good applications is available in the South African App Store.

 

One of my favourite Windows applications, is a program called Winboard. For those of you who do not know, it is a chess program. Now I can hear some Mac fan scream, but the Mac has the chess app. True, but it is very limited. It does not allow for keyboard input of algebraic notation, nor does it allow you to play on some of the more popular servers. It also  features only one chess engine, and does not allow you to add your own. I will not go in to detail here, but suffice it to say, apple failed on this one.

 

As you probably assumed from my rant regarding office, productivity is important to me. To this end, I got an app called Q-Read for windows which will read PDF and other e-book formats. I know that Mac OS 10.9 Mavericks has iBooks built in, but to my horror, Apple completely failed when he came to Accessibility on that. In other words, I had to resort to Windows to solve this problem.

 

This is not something I am glad for, but unfortunately it was necessary. It is not as though I have completely gotten rid of my Mac, I doubt that will ever happen, but until certain things happen, the Windows partition will stay on my computer.

 

I just hope windows does not break on me! I had to pay someone to do the installation, and it is not as if Windows is cheep to begin with. I am not paying for Windows ever again, that is for damn sure.

 

I haven't found any way to do a boot Camp installation with out sited  help as of yet, but believe me, I am looking. If anybody knows, let me know.

 

You can contact me by referring back to my first blog post, "introducing myself".

 

This is it for today, I hope this post leaves you with something to think about.

 

Cheers!!