I repurposed my wife’s old Toshiba laptop a year ago, installing Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on it to replace Windows 10. Today my Windows PC broke. It appears that the cooler has given up after five and a half years faithful service. The warranty of course was only for five years… I just have to make sure it is the cooler and not the PSU has gone and get it replaced.

I know it was overheating because I rebooted after 30 minutes and into the UEFI BIOS. There I watched the temperature climb at a rate of 1C every second. When it hit 75 C and the text turned red, I knew that it was overheating.

So I dug out the Toshiba and upgraded Ubuntu on it finally figuring out the password after 20 or so tries. Only 560 packages needed upgrading! That took a while and I’ve also been installing other software since. My VS Code was that old that it won’t actually update. When I did the Linux version of Asteroids I tested it on here.  It seems I have to download a recent version of VS Code which will let it upgrade with apt.

It shouldn’t but it never fails to surprise me how quick Linux is. This laptop has an I3 CPU and a hard disk and is about . It has 4 GB of RAM; I upgraded that a couple of years ago to try and speed up Windows. Even after upgrading Windows 8 to 10 and removing some of the Toshiba bloatware, it was never that quick. But now it flies.

Thankfully Chrome had the password to the site so I was able to login and write this from the laptop. I may have to do without my Windows PC for a week or two…