For the past six or so years, I have had an HP Elitebook laptop that I have carted around the world a few times, upgraded it a few times eventually to Windows 11 — amazingly, Microsoft still supports the thing. (It runs an Intel i7 and hads 16GB of RAM, so it is a pretty solid machine even now).
But it was showing signs of age (aren’t we all?): the sound, which used built-in B&O speakers, was no longer working and a few other quirks with the bundled HP security software that I was tired of dealing with.
Perhaps you are in a similar situation, or your business is in a similar situation. Read on, and learn from my many mistakes. Even though I have been working with PCs since the mid-1980s, there is still a lot I can learn.
What pushed me from “thinking about getting a replacement” to action was this security warning about this aging fax modem driver file ltmdm64.sys that could cause problems. I thought — ok, I am a security expert, let’s see if I have this file on my laptop. A quick search using File Manager brought up nothing, but then I realized that FM doesn’t tell you about system-level files. I rooted around some more and saw it eventually lurking in some dark Windows directory, but of course I couldn’t rename it or delete it. And this is a feature, not a bug, because the last thing I would want would be to have some malware get ahold of that directory and cause even more damage.
Enough already. But before I buy something new, I wanted to see if I could repurpose my laptop and install a less complicated OS that I could manage. Easy, I thought: Almost all of my use is through browser-based tools. And since I run my email through Google’s servers, I figured to start first with ChromeOSFlex. Unlike other OS’s, you don’t download an .iso image file and then use that to make a bootable USB drive. Instead, you have to go to the Chromebook Recovery Utility’s download page and download and prepare the bootable image that way. This utility is a browser extension. That should have been a warning sign.
There are two ways you can refresh your PC with a new OS: run the “live boot” from the USB drive, which means nothing gets put on your hard drive (in case something goes wrong) or to do a fresh install, in which case you destroy the (in my case) Windows files and start anew. Being a careful person, I choose door #1 and did the live boot.
Now, I have all sorts of security things on my Google account, including a Yubico hardware key, passkeys, an account password that is a complex string of numbers, letters and symbols (more on that in a moment). I also had one must-have browser extension — the Zoho Vault password manager. I thought having a Google OS would be a good thing. I was wrong.
The problem with ChromeOS is that it is not quite an OS — it is really Android that has been heavily modified and stripped down. You’ll see why in a moment.
Within short order I got a working system, the Zoho stuff worked just fine and I was ready to throw caution to the winds and do the great big wipeout and install ChromeOSFlex for real. Got everything flowing just fine, or so I thought. Then I shut down my machine for the night. Big mistake, as I found out the next day.
The problem is when ChromeOS boots up, it doesn’t quite know your keyboard driver. So the password that you type in doesn’t quite match. It didn’t help matters that my password contained a series of ones and zeros and the letter O and L. It wasn’t easy to figure this all out.
So Google kept saying I had entered a bad password. I eventually figured out when it is initially booting up, it doesn’t recognize my passkey, or my Yubico key. I don’t know why. And Google has made running ChromeOS that requires a boot password, so I was kinda stuck.
Now I had A Project. Over the past week, I have downloaded all sorts of Linux-flavored OSs. All had issues, until I downloaded Mint Linux. Twice — for some reason, the download didn’t take the first time around. I needed a ISO writer called balenaEtcher to create a bootable USB drive from my Mac. Eventually, I got things working, although I would have liked for Zoho to support an Opera browser extension on Linux, but they don’t have one, so now I am using Firefox for my web browser the moment.
What works: have sound once again, and my Yubico key and passkeys work just fine.
What doesn’t quite work: the control of the fonts inside the browser, or at least I haven’t figured out where that particular control is.
Lesson #1: Don’t do the complete wipeout until you have rebooted your old laptop a few times.
Lesson #2: If you have a critical software component (in my case, the password manager), make sure it supports your OS and browser version. This is why you try out the live boot option.
Lesson #3: Make sure your OS will run on your particular chipset, particularly if it isn’t a 64-bit Intel CPU. Read the fine print.
Lesson #4: If you have hardware keys or other USB things that you want supported, particularly test them on the live boot before committing to the total wipeout.
Lesson #5: Know your tools. ISO boots are a strange sub-culture. Make sure you have a sufficiently large USB thumb drive that can contain the boot image. Make sure you find a program that will create a bootable USB from your downloaded ISO file.
Wow, that’s scary. Glad you resolved everything, but that’s a few days of your life you’ll never get back. What do people without advanced tech skills do? My most exciting adventure was last year I had to reluctantly replace an old Dell laptop – it overheated and caught fire, literally. I went to Best Buy and was convinced to buy a “Surface” laptop. I got it home and learned it would not run some of my programs, something about the chip. I returned it to Best Buy for a full refund. Panicky, I went back to a local computer shop I’d used a couple times over the years for repairs. I brought in my deceased Dell laptop, still with a faint smoky odor. I bought a Lenovo ThinkPad from them and was so relieved that they were able to rescue my files from my old Dell laptop. (No way could you get that level of service from Best Buy.) The new Lenovo had what I considered a “normal” chip and so it ran everything. Sweet relief.
The top-level models of Thinkpads are superb. We all use them here, and I resell refurbed ones. Often, someone contacts me 5-6 years later and asks for a newer one.
I have been the antidote in my area to Best Buy’s overwhelming sell-sell-sell, fixing or recovering files or whatever to do what people really need.
As far as I am concerned, Lenovo is following the same path as Dell and HP. There are top-of-the-line Thinkpads, like the X-, T-, and P-series. One level below are the E-series, materials not as good and often quirky with misbehaving devices.
David, I guess I got lucky. I took a high end Lenovo Thinkpad W540 with 32GB, a 500GB SSD and lovely 3840×2160 screen and installed Linux Mint with Cinnamon UI that works a lot like Windows. Used it for a while, wrote an AskWoody article about my experiences, and then, OOPS! Sold it to someone who wanted a Linux laptop. Now I need to do it again! The lucky part is that I did not transition from a Windows laptop, so there was no data to move. I still have two Windows laptops, one running Windows 11 Canary.
That why I have another PC as a backup and I always backup to an external HD
I reformat my laptop every 3 mths and reinstall ….easy peasy. Takes only 15 mins