PC ARCHAEOLOGY

Dick Pountain /Idealog 332/ 03 Mar 2022 09:56

Regular readers of this column will know that I abandoned Windows for a Chromebook back in 2017, and have been extremely happy with my choice ever since (doctors now believe that every Windows upgrade you skip adds five years to your life). However as a columnist for a magazine that has “PC” in its title I can hardly turn my back on Microsoft completely, so I kept my last Windows machine, a Lenovo Yoga touch-screen laptop running Windows 8.1. This still runs my Canon printer and acts as a backup server via a large external Samsung USB drive, accessible from the Chromebook over wi-fi SMB. I once needed it to run a few programs, like Photoshop Elements, but all of those I’ve steadily displaced with Chromebook equivalents. 

But the Lenovo started to show its age, disk accesses got ever slower in that sinister way that suggests excessive error-correction, plus sporadic tussles with an infuriating Windows 8 rogue task called the Runtime Broker that consumes 100% CPU. Eventually it became too much of a chore to boot it up, but I was extremely disinclined to waste good money on a new machine running Windows 11 for the minimal purposes I required. Then I remembered that I still had my last-but-one laptop, a Sony Viao, sleeping peacefully in a closet. It’s the computer I used for half those 13 years I spent in Italy, during which it served without a hitch. It’s not a machine I would ever have bought for myself but was a Christmas present from our late chairman Felix Dennis. An ultra-slim Viao TZ21 with a carbon-fibre case and a very vivid 11" diagonal, 1,366x768 resolution screen, I shrink from imagining what it must have cost him. It’s far, far too good to throw away, I know, I’ll resurrect it! 

After eight dormant years in that cupboard, on plugging in and charging, the Viao booted up straight away, and then the fun began. For starters it’s 32-, not 64-bit, still runs Windows 7 Professional, and its wi-fi adapter is 14 years behind the times. How to make it rejoin the modern world? I became suddenly aware just how far in The Cloud I now live, because when I went into Windows Network Manager, though it could see my BT hub it wouldn’t connect. In Italy our remote valley lay beyond Telecom Italia’s ADSL network, so I used the Viao via a mobile phone connection from a newly built mast on the nearby mountain top. And of course their proprietary software wouldn’t work with a UK SIM even had I wanted it to. So how to get online?

A quick check in System Config showed there were indeed two network adapters in the Vaio, an Intel Wireless 3945ABG and a Marvell Yukon 88E8055 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet, but I no longer have an Ethernet cable and the Intel clearly didn’t like my BT Hub 6. I suppose a grown-up would have started trying to diagnose the wi-fi problem, but I passionately loathe fiddling with networks or comms, and so I took the coward’s way out by fleeing to Amazon on the Chromebook. For an eye-watering £5.19 I ordered a TP-Link 150 Mbps Wireless Nano USB Wi-Fi Dongle, and when the thumbnail-sized widget arrived I popped it in a spare USB port. Like some parasitic insect it injected its drivers, flashed its little green light and connected immediately. Ookla showed a 30mps download speed, less than half what my Chromebook gets but twice what that costive Lenovo was getting 

Now for a browser. I’d been using Opera in Italy but even after updating it was deeply unhappy about certificates and stuff. Given that my life belongs to Google I had to get Chrome going. It took forever to download, let alone install, and it too was deeply unhappy, bitching about all kind of security problems and repeatedly making me identify myself. I got it sort of going but it was tragically slow and comically cranky, refusing to connect to The Guardian as a security risk (perhaps it’s joined the EDL?) So I did what you have to and reinstalled Firefox. 

After a couple of updates Firefox runs like the clappers, opens everything without demur and is not too proud to suck in all my Chrome settings and bookmarks: it works flawlessly with Gmail, Google calendar and contacts and so has effectively turned the Viao into a slower Chromebook utility-wise (though of course it can’t run Android apps). That’s all I need it to be, and for £5.19. And rather to my surprise, I understood that Windows 7 was the last version I actually liked: that Windows Button and left-side menu…

[Dick Pountain is rather enjoying retro computing]