Cleaning out an entire business operation has led to a few discoveries.
Hidden caches of tools, bottles of unknown substances, pieces of strange equipment that even I struggle to identify, and so much trash… All of the stuff a couple dozen employees leave behind in five years of a busy algae-growing operation.
This included a stack of five laptop computers, two Macs and three pc’s. So one evening I handed off the Macs to my wife to check while I diagnosed the pc’s.
One Mac is toast, a cracked screen and damaged case, clearly dropped at some point. Checking the model and vintage, we find it is not worth the effort to fix… One for the bin. The second Mac is questionable, with a flaky charge port and dodgy WiFi.
The pc’s? One, a very low-end HP model seems fine.
The second machine, a more promising-looking Lenovo IdeaPad that is only a couple of years old. Opening the machine, stuck beside the trackpad, I find a bright yellow sticky note with large, friendly letters written in Sharpie… “Throw me Away”.
Hmmm… Maybe not.
Well? The machine boots easily enough, screen, keyboard, and trackpad are working just fine. I am presented with the login screen for an employee who left the company over a year ago. I cannot go further, Windows and the drive are locked down pretty hard.
This is not a real concern, I really do not want another Windows machine. I downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu and set up a USB drive. The machine boots just fine into Linux off the thumb drive. It took some command-line futzing and a fair amount of AI assistance to find the right Linux commands to wipe the hard drive. I cleared the encrypted Windows partitions and configured an Ubuntu install.
After waiting for Ubuntu to install, I found I have an operational laptop that seems to be in pretty good shape. I wonder… why the doomed sticky note? Was it the lockdown and encrypted drive that stopped anyone from re-using the machine?
Well? I need a reliable work machine, and Windows has become increasingly unacceptable over the years, time to get serious about Linux. I peel off the yellow sticky note and follow the instructions… I throw it away.