There is a setting in iTunes that causes it to start up whenever an iThingie is detected—and ever since iOS 5, that includes via wifi. So this iTunes installation has been detecting iPhones and now it won’t let me get in past the “device detected, can’t identify” dialog boxes to turn off that damn setting (which I thought I’d turned off already). I should have removed iTunes from that computer. I decided to do that forthwith.
The removal went through, and because iTunes is a big, bloaty thing with its hooks deep in Windows, the system has to reboot to complete the process. Fewer and fewer applications require this, but Apple and Adobe seem to be among the holdouts. Possibly also Norton/Symantec, but I haven’t allowed anything of theirs on a computer in my care since the big four-digit number on the calendar started with a “1.”
It was the reboot that failed. The old laptop suddenly acted like it couldn’t locate the operating system.
Well, MagicJack has a new thing out that costs a little more per year but doesn’t require a host computer. I used one of our other gizmos to order that, and I put the seemingly toasted old laptop aside.
Over the subsequent few days I wondered whether the “dead” laptop was salvageable, perhaps with a Windows recovery disc or an alternative OS installed on a flash drive. So I brought it out, opened the lid, and pushed the power button. It booted right up.
A little more tinkering elicited a repetition or two of the reboot failure cycle, so I decided to go ahead and try a different OS on it, vis flash drive.
I downloaded a copy of the Windows 8 developer preview and tested it in VM but couldn’t get it to finish booting even in that environment. I even tried a copy of Android built for x86 but that didn’t fare any better. I’ve already messed around with Ubuntu Linux and wasn’t interested in it anymore.
So I got ChromeOS, in a build designed for PCs and laptops like this one (Chromium Lime, because it supports the wifi card in this laptop). And while the flash-drive-booted version had a few glitches I expected that installing it directly on the hard drive should fix that.
It didn’t. I’ve sometimes had to run the laptop through three or four reboot cycles just to get past the login password step. In fact keyboard input locks the system up almost predictably. Now, this might be an incompatibility problem between this particular laptop and this particular build of Lime, but nowhere did I ever see a build described as “stable” that I could revert to in its place. This may be a fundamental incompatibility between the OS and Intel architecture.
If you’ve never used ChromeOS, it’s essentially Google’s Chrome web browser retooled to be its own OS. It does a few things the regular browser doesn’t do, but in this case it doesn’t do them well at all. And all the reasons I don’t use Chrome on my own bugbook are reconfirmed in this case.
We still have the Windows 7 installation discs that I used to upgrade this old laptop from Vista, so I can reinstall it if I want to (I originally used it to install Win7 on an even older WinXP desktop that has since died and been discarded). It would be a huge hassle including getting Microsoft to validate a third install from the same set of discs. And what would be gained?
My wife uses the Chrome browser, and Chrome has become popular since its advent. I just don’t see why. ChromeOS doesn’t seem to be taking off quite so well.
That, I can understand.
