Asus X205TA – Lengthen Laptop Life with Linux

It’s strange to think that I’ve had this laptop around for nearly 10 years. Putting those years in context of my technical knowledge, it seems a lifetime ago.

I owe a lot to this little, £130, underpowered (even at the time) machine. Sat in my car refining and sending off my CV for numerous jobs whilst waiting for my hateful call centre job to begin helped me break into a technical role.

The end of Windows 10 support in October 2025 could be considered a full stop on this laptop’s usefulness, however Windows claimed this as a victim long ago. The 32GB eMMC storage was entirely consumed by just the operating system and its pending updates, which relegated this system to version 18.09.

One point of the X205TA that really impressed was the battery life, with an OS estimated 10 hours at full charge it was something 2016 me had never seen before.

The thought occurred that I’d like a lounge terminal, something with a proper keyboard and screen that I could use to SSH into other machines, with a web browser for reference.

Could I breathe new life into the X205TA with the introduction of a Linux Desktop?

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Macbook M1 Pro – 3 External Screens

New job, new laptop; this time it’s a Macbook M1 Pro 2021 model.

Switching to a Mac for daily use takes some getting used to, so my hope at least was to preserve my 3x 1080p monitor setup with the laptop in clamshell mode (lid closed). I’d been accustomed to for many years so was hoping this would aid the transition to a whole new Mac ecosystem.

The specifications and online hear-say suggest that the maximum supported outputs are two monitors plus the Mac’s display. But there is a way to get 3 screens running on an M1 Macbook Pro…

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My FTTP Journey

Unexpectedly and to much excitement, my home internet is now provided via FTTP.

For background, I was previously in a FTTC environment getting average speeds due to my distance from the cab, however good enough to assumably be overlooked for the next phase of the Openreach Ultrafast rollout. Not that I’m complaining, 2020 is the year my speed gets a much-needed boost.

2020 also turns out to be the inaugural international work from home year, so had the opportunity to have a front seat view from my home office on the activity and timeline that brought FTTP home.

I’d like to share my observations and timeline as an example of what you can expect should you get the inkling of fibre coming to your street soon.

Before we get started, as my expectations rose, I found this post by Andy’s World invaluable for identifying activity and helping me confirm that FTTP was on its way.

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Review: Asus X205TA

It’s not often that I post a review about a product on this blog, but on this occasion I want to showcase an item that does not have a lot of exposure on the web, nor the reviews do it justice.

I’m talking about the Asus X205TA, essentially a low cost, low weight, basic Windows laptop that does the basics. At a retail price of £179 (less with the offers it seems to attract) its price point puts it among lower end Android tablets and Chromebooks. But here the big attraction is its ability to run full versions of Windows, making it a contender as an ultra-portable daily driver.

Asus X205TA
Asus X205TA

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First Look At Windows 10

I just got my first hands on look at Windows 10, before I even start I must note that this is not going to be an in depth review of the system as I am just hopeless at writing reviews, so instead here are a quick few pointers of what I noticed.

Windows 10 Start Menu
Windows 10 Start Menu

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Upgrading RAID Disks

The time came when my 1TB drives were full, having a data clearout reclaimed a bit of free space but it was time to upgrade.

The HP Microserver I am running has four HDD bays all populated with 1TB drives in RAID 1 configuration, so to increase capacity I had to replace two of the disks. I went for two Western Digital Green 2TB disks as the 1TB variants I currently had proved reliable.

Moving the data over to a new disk would be tricky, the simplest solution would be to put the old drives into a USB caddy and plug into the server, but I had previously found that USB drives don’t like RAID. But since RAID1 means redundancy, I could tackle this another way…

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UPS Investment

From the last post, the idea of having UPS in my home may put me off forever, but to put it into context the unit had been installed before I was employed over 12 years ago, and over the past 2 years it was beeping intermittently to indicate a fault that a convenient press on any button would silence.

The post before that however had more gravitas, with my server being offline for close to a month all due to a one second power cut made me feel vulnerable to another downtime incident over something I couldn’t control. It was time to look into a Uninterruptable Power Supply to protect my server from power cuts that could knock my RAID out of sync.

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Installing WordPress on Windows Server

It’s simple, instead of the process of installing PHP, MySQL, assigning permissions and all the debugging that many of us have gone through, Microsoft has come up with WPI, or Web Platform Installer.

wpi1
WPI makes installing WordPress easy.

Amongst other web applications, WordPress is the most popular and it makes the install on Windows as simple as a few clicks.

wpi2
All done!

So far I’ve tried it on Server 2003 R2 and Server 2012 R2, both with instant success.

It’s available at: http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx