I’m celebrating an anniversary of sorts this month.
It’s been a year since I got this HP Pavilion ZD8000 up and running. It was brought into work with a few other war weary computers like mutts brought into a dog pound. Either they would find a home or meet oblivion in a dumpster. The HP was a battered and well-used Windows machine that had a huge power brick that looked like a particularly savage dog chewed on it. I was going to pass it up, but it’s huge 17 inch screen and it’s specs I looked up online appealed to me. I took a chance and purchased a third party AC power adapter. When it arrived, it powered on and booted into Windows, but after a while, the fans would run like crazy and it would shut off with a disconcerting phut.
I cracked open the box and found a whole family of dust bunnies within. I cleaned it out and reseated the heat sink to the processor with some fresh thermal paste. I put it all back together and with a fresh install of a Linux operating system, it runs like a charm.
I’ve been using this laptop every day since then, and I love it. For $25 and some elbow grease I have learned a lot and, despite being from 2005, I wound up with a fairly powerful Linux machine. I’ve also fell completely in love with a few Linux distributions such as Mint and Ubuntu.
