About a year ago, I ripped out the hard drive in a rapidly aging laptop and replaced it with a new one on which I had installed Ubuntu Linux. At the time, I thought I was being rather clever; the machine was crashing constantly under Windows, and I figured that, after 4 years, the ancient HP Omnibook 510 was due for a new hard drive anyhow. Unfortunately, the crashes continued under Ubuntu, to the point where I ended up shoving the laptop into a drawer, convinced that, perhaps, all of the talk about Linux being a more stable OS was just wishful thinking. However, I recently pulled the PC out of the drawer, and decided to try a little experiment. What if, I thought, the problem wasn’t with the original hard drive or new OS? What if it was the hard drive controller? In that case, any hard drive I install will have periodic problems, regardless of the software on it. But if I could boot and operate the PC from an external drive, perhaps it would still work. And that was my project this weekend. Following the excellent instructions on PendriveLinux, I installed Slax on a 512MB thumbdrive. I updated my BIOS to boot from the thumbdrive, and waited. The PC booted, and after a crash-free weekend, I’m guardedly optimistic. The experience hasn’t been flawless; I’ve had to add a shell script to get the PC to recognize my PCMCIA WiFi card and connect to my home network at boot time (and to set the system time via the net, since the internal clock’s battery has long since given up the ghost). And a couple of times, I’ve rebooted without first saving my files back to the thumbdrive. (Slax is designed to run as a Live CD, so it saves all data to RAM; reboot without saving it back to a writeable disk, and it’s all gone.) So far, though, Slax looks like a great option for this old machine. Despite its slow processor (1GHz) and modest RAM (768, some of which is set aside for the Linux kernel and RAM drive), performance is peppy. I wouldn’t use this machine to run GIMP or Doom, but for day-to-day web surfing and modest entertainment (music via a NAS), it’s worth keeping it out of the drawer. And it looks like I’ll be able to use that hard drive as a backup, once I pick up a cheap enclosure.

I’ve been pondering the recent news that Microsoft is planning to release an ad-supported version of Works as a free desktop product, and I do think MS may be onto something with this. While most pundits are saying that the company should have released a web-based suite, a free version of Works may actually make more sense for MS. After all, even though web-based apps continue to gain popularity, the bigger threat to MS’s dominance of the office apps market right now is Open Office, which gets better and slicker with each new release. A free version of Works gives MS a way to compete directly with OO, and can also give the company a huge database of customers to whom it can pitch its higher-end products. And, the company really has nothing to lose; Works isn’t a big money-maker for MS, and it’s not even showing up in as many bundles as it used to, as MS pushes manufacturers to include trial versions of Office instead. The only real risk is that many users may find Works adequate and decide they don’t need a full-featured suite, but given the growth of OO, that seems like a risk that’s worth taking.