"I need a new laptop....."

Yes, they've really put the effort in over the years with drivers and such.

I particularly enjoy the not being without use of the machine for ages during updates.

what is easier than inserting a DVD in the drive, answering three questions and going away for 45 minutes?

Making the DVD is the hardest part..

...you will rest easy in your bigotry...

well then put windows in a virtualbox.

Opened up a Sparc with strange misbehaving to find the CPU fan had completely seized

I think in that case the CPU was also beyond repair.

Until you need to do an update over three major versions.

That did break my whole server as there was a lot of custom software installed...

..I ended up reinstalling the operating system and rebuilding the thing from backups

I am scared to upgrade this 2015 17.3 desktop to 20.x...until I have tested everything I might need.

I might slide a new SSD in it and have it dual boot until it works OK on the later version.

A few years ago, my son (the non techy one) said his lapstop was very slow. I took it apart and noticed a thick felt filter on the fan intake.

Then I realised it was a block of dust. He used to use it on his bed.

Removed that, and it stopped clocking down to prevent overheating.

Or leave it in complete charge of the hardware, and don't bother with linux at all. Stick that in a partition of its own if you really must, but why bother with all that aggro ?.

I followed the instructions to make a bootable drive once before

and it didn't (boot off it), and yes I had changed my boot sequence to USB first

Desktop. It played havoc with the backups, apparently.

The Ubuntu ISO is a hybrid + USBboot and can be "dd" transferred from the download file, directly to the USB stick. In this answer, I'm assuming a Windows user who wishes to stretch out a bit with their experiments.

For example:

cd /d C:\users\username\Downloads

dd --list # lists the device names # same order as Disk Management # *Don't write the incorrect drive!*

dd.exe if=ubuntu.iso of=\\?\Device\Harddisk2\Partition0 bs=2048

In the example, Harddisk2 is an unused USB flash stick. Using "dd --list" is so you get the identifiers first. If you are having trouble understanding what it tells you, stop there and find a Rufus instead (description below).

The block size choice of 2KB works, because the native sector size of optical media is 2KB. That size choice should always work.

Some ISO images have been padded to multiples of 1048576 and then the invocation can be:

dd.exe if=ubuntu.iso of=\\?\Device\Harddisk2\Partition0 bs=1048576

Using a hand calculator, you can investigate whether the image is divisible by some "decent number" for transfer. A larger block size choice may be better with respect to USB flash "page size" internally. It causes less wear on the USB stick, to use bs=1048576 aka bs=1m .

I have even, on occasion, padded up ISO files with some zeros on the end, to make the file evenly divisible by a larger number. The HxD hex editor allows doing things like that. This is a Windows utility, and a very nice one.

More generally, this is one of the few utilities on the Windows side, that can do a good job of making boot media for you. If you're not a fan of "dd.exe" or whatever. This allows a mostly graphical approach.

Paul

Normally due to fluff inside, but then again there are a lot of laptops out there that are just too slow under normal circumstances. Also overheating can cause some weird effects I find. With the news that Msoft are going to make a blinged up Windows version for the plebs and yet keep making 10 but without the huge updates every few months, it may be finally time to actually get 10 instead of 7. What really Windows needs is new processors like Apple are doing to keep the heat down and a new built from scratch Windows. Intel seem to have lost the plot rather in recent years. Laptops just get too hot and the battery life is crap as a result. Brian

Well, probably not required. I think a lot of nonsense is blamed on users when any system which has a good design should be able to tolerate normal people using it. Its the old I'm an IT pro and you are a pleb stuff, which I do not buy into at all. Its poor design of software and in many cases hardware too, which are not meant for the rigours of the real world out there. Brian

To be fair I have had to recently ditch an installation, it never really recovered after a moody upgrade.

I've had bootloader and graphics driver issues in years past, but it's been seamless for the last few years.

I suppose you could do multiple upgrades from one version to the subsequent next, might be safer but would probably take an age.

The real problem is if you have anything other than a vanilla install.

I had quite a bit of compiled code that didn't work till it was recompiled, and some applications from outside the main repository and so on

In the end it was about a days work in total spread over about a week to reinstate everything

But it was 5+ years old installation that was out of long term support

Clone the drive and give it a punt?

Well on that one I already had the drive cloned, so it became a process of installing the new and using the old to restore the detailed configuration

- I can lose a lot of it, but not all

I am coming round to 'install a new SSD, and install on that, then mount old SSD and copy stuff across'

Doesn't everyone use USB sticks nowadays?

same applies really - and no. More desktops/laptops are set to boot from CD/DVD than from USB.

Need to keep up.