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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • alright, go through the ubuntu installer and pick the “install alongside” option when it comes up. it ought to be at the same time that it offers you the option to erase the disk altogether. the “installation type” menu. if you don’t get that option, stop and say so.

    e: i just finished installing ubuntu desktop lts alongside windows 11 in a vm using the process you’re doing. its the disk selection menu, not the installation type.


  • right on, you have enough space to not end up in trouble!

    in windows, right click the start menu and choose “disk management”

    it’ll bring up an old looking MSI that shows your drive and the different partitions it has.

    right click the C drive and choose “shrink”.

    you’ll get asked how much you want to shrink it by iirc. type in the number and click okay.

    once that is done, the disk management window will show the new free space.

    if everything goes as planned, make sure you turned off bitlocker and restart into windows.




  • Imma just start typing and see where this goes:

    Sd cards arent the same as usbs or ssds. They seem the same because it’s like the same thing right? But they’re not.

    Most usbs and all ssds have a controller that actually handles writing and reading to and from the memory chip. The controller lets them do things like recognize bad spots and write data elsewhere, perform secure erase functions, wear leveling and all sorts of the kinda stuff we expect of components we’re gonna use as hard drives.

    Sd cards almost universally don’t have that controller. The goal for sd cards was to provide bulk storage to all kinds of embedded devices like cameras and later, phones. Because there’s no controller, there’s no wear leveling, no overprovisioning, no secure erase. That’s fine because the goal was always to just slam the sucker full of pictures and never erase it till it gets full, then start all over again.

    But if sd cards aren’t acceptable hard drives then how come we use them in little sbcs like raspberry pi and whatnot?

    Well the install process in that case almost always writes the system to the card first instead of doing a million reads and writes to figure out what repositories are available, updating packages, etc. sbc systems using sd cards as their storage are also (or should be!) configured to do minimal writes, with constrained log sizes and minimal swap.

    So don’t use an sd as a usb or hard drive.

    People might say that I’m wrong in replies to this post. They’ll say that sd cards are fine and that they have over 20k write cycles on their hyinx megacard128. Sd fails silently. I am not wrong. You literally just had problems installing from an sd. I can’t tell for sure if your problems came from using an sd or misconfiguring the new partition scheme but it sure as heck didn’t help that you used an sd as your install media.

    Okay, now you said you have windows back up and running. Is it fully recovered and working good?

    Is it using the whole drive?

    Do you have all your files back?

    Have you made a backup?

    If you answer these questions I can walk you through the process of setting up windows to dual boot Linux in a way that won’t fuck up.




  • While you’re right that going all the way up to the 4.2v that the battery is rated for is worse than if it just stayed at 4v, by not discharging to half or more you’re reducing the charge cycles which directly correlates to longer life.

    Ultimately in lieu of a charge controller or os that does that for you, the easiest way for a user to extend battery life without going psycho mode is to charge they phone, eat hot chip and lie.

    I know all the macs and iphones have that predictive charging thing where if you’re always leaving your phone or computer or phone plugged in overnight they’ll keep it around 80% or so till about an hour before you wake up and charge the rest of the way then.

    Windows computers have something called smart charging but I don’t have any experience with it.

    Theres a bunch of different ways to control charging in Linux.

    It really seems like this is a solved problem and I’m glad to not be worrying about plugging and unplugging my phone to maximize my battery life.



  • There’s two things you might be talking about here:

    The old way of making sure nickel cadmium batteries didn’t degrade, which was to discharge them all the way and charge them back up all the way. Your new laptop is almost certainly using lithium ion batteries which are chemically “damaged” more through that process than just leaving them plugged up all the time.

    You could be talking about the old way of dealing with charge controllers, where the controller relied on the bios or os to tell it what to do and didn’t “know” how to respond to batteries at different stages of charge. This hasn’t been the situation for like fifteen years. Nowadays charge controllers go “yup, ready to go boss, 12345mah of charge, 90%” when some bios or os polls them.

    You don’t even need to manually keep your battery in the 20-80 range nowadays since almost every charge controller automatically monitors temperature and adjusts charging parameters to not damage the battery. It’s not like the old days where the charge controller was just an ic controlling a fet acting as a slucegate between the battery and the power brick.

    Heck, lithium ion batteries nowadays last longest the longer they’re plugged in. Running them to <10% every charge cycle actually diminishes battery life!

    Tldr welcome to the future, don’t worry about it!


  • Cat /proc/cpuinfo will tell you the bogomips.

    If your old core processor is slow, open the laptop up, remove and clean the fan, remove the heatsink and clean it and the processor die with isopropyl alcohol and apply new thermal grease before you put it all back together.

    If you have bad I/o with an ssd of some sort, do a spinrite level 2 scan of the drive. It reads and then rewrites all the blocks, which fixes the problem.

    I used this exact model for years and idk what your expectation is but I found it to be right fast.

    Don’t bother benchmarking a laptop unless you’ve cleaned the dust out, regreased the cpu and run a lvl2 scan on the ssd. All you’ll have is a number that tells you “yep, it’s slow.” And someone like me will say exactly what I just did.