Tech and life

If you spend a lot of time on the move and need to charge your mobile devices, have a look at the Powermonkey-classic charger from power traveller. I’ve just bought one on Amazon (£16 in the UK; about 25 US dollars) as my daughter is about to head out to Africa with a group to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and will be away from conventional charging facilities for at least 5 or 6 days. She needed a portable charging unit capable of charging her mobile phone and mp3 player.

Charging the Powermonkey

Charging the Powermonkey is very straightforward – it comes with a universal mains charger (which works in over 150 countries) with a selection of interchangeable plugs. You can also charge the Powermonkey from a USB port on a PC using a separate retractable USB cable. A red light glows when charging, green when charged.

Charging your devices

The Powermonkey is supplied with a selection of charging tips for various devices but if you can’t find one to suit your device, you can always use your usual charging cable (USB port to device) because crucially there’s a female USB tip for the charger (shown attached in the image above) – so it’s just like charging your device from your PC. Or additional tips for specific devices are available on the power traveller website.

Haven’t tried it out fully yet but the specs say it holds its charge for up to one year and delivers power for 40 hours iPod use, or 96 hours mobile phone use. I read a review on Amazon which said it would charge an iPod twice before it needed charging. Anyway, I’ll update this post when I’ve confirmed how often it can charge up our devices before needing recharging.

By the way, I don’t do paid product reviews, and I’m not being paid for this post. Just blogging about solutions which work for me.

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About a month ago, without any warning, my desktop Windows 7 system suddenly bluescreened reporting an ‘uncorrectable hardware error’. Everything had been working fine up to that point, I was just surfing the net and not stressing the system in any way. There was absolutely no prior indication that things were about to go pear shaped. I tried rebooting but soon after boot up was complete and I was on the internet again I got the same stop error code 124. I didn’t do a screen capture of the error message but here’s a very similar shot I found:

I suspected a motherboard problem. Although I had installed a new hard drive with Windows 7 recently, the other hardware components in my PC were about 5 years old including the Soltek SL-75DRV4 Socket A motherboard.

Unfortunately, I’m not a repair tech so I took it to a good mate who is. He diagnosed a problem with the voltage controller on the motherboard but because of the age of the motherboard, I needed a motherboard/processor/RAM replacement. But when he replaced the motherboard and tried to boot the hard drive with Windows 7 installed he got a blue screen hardware error. He couldn’t do a Windows repair to set up the hard drive with the replacement motherboard. He phoned Microsoft but they said a Windows 7 repair couldn’t be done – you have to reinstall Windows 7. A Windows repair for a new motherboard used to be no problem with Windows XP.

I had the Windows 7 retail disk and the product key but I didn’t want to have to reinstall Windows 7 on the hard drive as I had just got it configured and running as I wanted it. That seemed like a real backward step.

Eventually he managed to sort this problem without a Windows 7 reinstall. He plugged my hard drive in as a slave in another PC, booted up and deleted the motherboard drivers on the slave drive. When the hard drive was plugged back into my PC with the new motherboard, it found and installed the drivers it needed. I just had to go through Windows activation using the automated phone system and everything went fine. One month on now and so far no problems.

Just though I’d post this as a salutary tale. You never know when disaster will strike and it can be completely without warning. Data backups are obviously  important but in this case I was down for a couple of weeks while the problem was diagnosed, parts ordered and installed and the machine set up again.

If you use your PC or laptop as a vital part of a small business and it’s the only machine you have, you’d be well advised to have a backup machine ready to take over in the event of a hardware failure like this.

Setting up a Windows 7 hard drive without a Windows reinstall after a hardware failure is a post from Tech and Life. If you’re reading it in full elsewhere, it’s been copied without consent. Please go to Tech and Life to read the original post and many others in the archive.

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There was a time when my printer was an absolute essential in the home office. Back in the early 1990s, my Epson dot matrix printer was regularly printing out letters to mail or fax, or stuff to file in folders. Since then I’ve had a series of inkjets which I’ve also used to print out photos, lists, colour flyers, etc.

But times have changed here. In these days of digital communication, my latest Epson inkjet rarely gets used – brought home to me as I tried to print something out last week and found the nozzles were seriously clogged through lack of use. Haven’t been able to clear it yet – but there’s no rush; nothing pressing for it to do. In hindsight, I should have been printing off a test page or two each week, but these things creep up on you. Besides, why should I have to print out test sheets just to keep the thing serviceable? Waste of paper and ink. Wish there was a way to seal inkjet cartridges and nozzles when not in regular use.

Interestingly, I’ve seen an inverse relationship between the printer and my Epson scanner. Although I don’t have a paperless office here, nothing like it, I do find I’m scanning more and more stuff into notebook apps like Evernote and Microsoft OneNote rather than printing stuff out on paper. I stopped printing out photos years ago. Makes a lot of sense to me to store digitally rather than on paper.

Well that’s what I thought. While I was thinking over this topic, I did a Google search and came across a post The slow demise of the printer by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes at ZDNet. Here’s a short excerpt:

Another indication of how rarely I use my printer is the fact that the last few times I’ve used it, I’ve had to clean the print heads because some of the nozzles had dried out. I change ink cartridges so rarely now that not only do I not know the part numbers, I’d even forgotten what make of printer I had!

…I’m not alone when it comes to using my printer less. It’s a pattern I see all around me. In fact, I’d say that the decreased use of the printer is also responsible for fewer home users/small office users buying and using suites such as Microsoft Office. As people create fewer paper documents (and in my opinion spend less time fussing over formatting, fonts and layout), they also realized they could do without expensive tools to create and format their documents.

While the desktop printer isn’t dead, it sure is en route to retirement.

I broadly agree with his post, but the blog comments were worth reading. There were 91 comments and only about 20 were in agreement with Kingsley-Hughes. Seems that business is still consuming paper at an alarming rate and many others who commented felt that printing and printers are not dead yet.  Some had worries over the risk of digital storage and would like a hard copy, just in case. And as to my problem, looks like I should research a laser printer rather than inkjet next time. I guess I should have some kind of printer in the home office, at least for a while yet.

Do you feel that the home printer is on the way out or will it be around for years to come? Drop a comment below.

The gradual demise of the home printer is a post from Tech and Life. If you’re reading it in full elsewhere, it’s been copied without consent. Please go to Tech and Life to read the original post and many others in the archive.

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I was clearing out some old computer magazines and files the other day when I came across a flyer which brought back memories…from 1988! I had saved up enough to buy my first computer and decided on the Opus PC V AT-compatible. Had to drive up to the city to a small supplier – no computer stores in those days, just the occasional small tech shop. Needless to say, the machine was state-of-the-art at that time.

In those days PCs weren’t for everyone. Pre-Windows and no internet so why would you want one. Apart from us geeks, PCs then were the preserve of business and were mainly used for word processing, spreadsheets, databases and DTP. But what really shocked me were the specs… and the price I paid for 1988 state-of-the-art tech. This is the flip side of the flyer:

I’ll pick out the ‘best’ points:

30MB hard drive – that’s 0.03GB in modern money! And that was big enough.

5.25” floppy drive – Disks had a capacity of 1.2MB.

1MB memory – no, not 1GB but 1MB. And that was just about enough.

6MHz clock speed with Turbo button taking it to …10MHz. Modern PCs are a gazzilion times faster with the latest Core i7 processors running at 3.33GHz clock speed.

14” display – amber on black ( I subsequently paid out even more for the optional colour display).

And the price – yes, only £1295 – that’s currently equivalent to US$1960.

And remember, there was no GUI in those days, just a command line – I think it was running Microsoft MS DOS 3.2. But it got the job done. And just for good measure, here’s a selection of 5.25” floppy disks with some of the programs I used in the early 1990s:

Tech has come a long way in a generation – in specs and price!

What was your first computer?

If you carry your data on a USB drive, I’m sure you’re always worried about losing it. Of course you should always take the necessary precautions about protecting the data on it like making sure it’s backed up somewhere safe and encrypting the data on it if necessary. But we don’t always do this and so we might end up losing some valuable information.

You could use Flash Drive Reminder which pops up a reminder when you try and log off Windows without removing your USB drive. Putting the drive on a car key ring might also help you to remember it but if you haven’t done this, what about getting the stick back? Doubtless if lost, some finders would just keep it, look at the data, or delete the encrypted data and reuse the stick, but I’m sure many with good intentions would return it if given the chance.

Well you could use LostDrive and edit the contact details. Or just put a text file in the root directory of the stick with your contact details. You could call the file ‘Read-me-if-you-find-this-USB-stick.txt’. But you mightn’t be happy about putting contact details in there in case the drive falls into the wrong hands.

Well I’ve come across a free service called whspr! which allows you to be contacted by email without giving away any personal details in the text file.

If you fill out the form there they give you a URL which you could put in the text file. Anyone who finds your USB stick hopefully will open the text file. You could put a message thanking them for opening the file and that you’d be most grateful if you could get in touch with the owner by clicking the URL. This would send them to a form at whspr where they can send you an email message. whspr forwards the message to your email address and now you can get in touch with the finder whose email is on the form. The URL lasts for up to 365 days so you have to remember to renew it before then. So set up an email or text reminder with your reminder app, for example Task.fm, to remind you say a week before the URL expires and get a new URL from whspr.

Hopefully, these tips should help you minimize the loss of a USB stick. Have you any tips? Drop a comment below.

Image credit: jatop

It’s possible to scan notes and documents directly to Evernote, the popular note-taking application, using Epson scanners. Here’s a quick walk-through for an Epson Perfection 4180 scanner and using Epson Scan v3.04E software.

First launch Epson Smart Panel and choose Scan to Application under Photo Project

Then scan your document/s or note/s in the usual way. I’m going to scan in a business card for this example. I found these settings were fine:

Preview, locate the image and scan it. Carry on scanning further documents and notes if you have them then close the above window. The View Images window will then appear showing all the images you have just scanned

You can actually go back and scan more notes at this stage by clicking the button in the bottom left corner. I’ve renamed my scanned image with a more useful name which will help searching in Evernote – but Evernote will pick up the text in the scanned image anyway and make that searchable. Once you click Next, you will see the applications which the scanner can already scan to. Evernote is probably not on this yet.

So we have to add Evernote to these applications. Click on the settings button (with the tool symbols) at the bottom left and then click Register at the bottom left of the Settings menu

Now you have to enter details so the scanner software can find Evernote on your PC

I’m using Evernote 3.5 beta but you may still be using the older version. In the Location panel, just click Browse and navigate until you find the Evernote.exe program (it’ll have the familiar elephant icon on green background) and click on it. Select the icon you want to use to display Evernote as in the Applications panel below. I scanned the business card as a jpg file so I have still to change the Format in the bottom panel. When you click OK you should now see Evernote registered as an application as in the screen below and you won’t have to do this registration part again – unless any subsequent Evernote upgrade changes the name of the Evernote folder! Then you would have to redefine the location of Evernote in the Location panel above.

Almost there now. Highlight Evernote and click the Settings (Tools) button at the bottom left again to check the settings you will use to save the file to Evernote:

Finally when you are happy with the settings click OK, then click Launch on the next screen and you will see the following prompt:

Click No to have the image files go directly to Evernote. Launch Evernote from your taskbar or system tray and the new note should be there. Tag it with suitable tags and drag it to the correct notebook.

Hope that’s helped in setting up your Epson scanner for Evernote. If you’re using a different version of the Epson Scan software and the procedure is different, let us know in the comments.

So you’re still running Windows XP on an older PC but you’ve decided that you should move to Windows 7 soon. You’ve run Windows Upgrade Advisor to ensure your PC will run Windows 7 and your PC’s fine but your old hard drive of 3 or 4 years is only 80GB and you’re running short of disk space. Time for a fresh start with a new hard drive. High capacity (1TB) hard drives are cheap these days and they really aren’t that hard to fit. I’ll walk you through how I installed a new SATA hard drive in my PC.

The hard drive in my primary PC is a 4 year old Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 80GB ATA/133 hard drive and for quite some time I’ve been running with less than 10GB of free disk space. So I was never really able to test the Windows 7 beta or RC candidate. However I’ve blogged about the very favourable pre-release pricing of the full version of Windows 7 in the UK, so I preordered Windows 7 Home Premium from Amazon for £63.

I made a decision that I would do a clean install of Windows 7 on a new 1TB SATA hard drive and hold onto my old Maxtor drive with XP for a while – just in case. Then when I’m totally happy with Windows 7, I’ll reformat that old drive and use it for storage. Having said that, although that drive has performed faultlessly for about 4 years, I realise it is probably nearing the end of its life so I won’t rely on it for critical backups. I’ll make sure everything on it is backed up elsewhere as well.

Anyway, back to the hardware upgrade. Here’s how I went about it. Bearing in mind that I’ve never build a PC before and the most I’ve done in the past has been to add additional sticks of RAM, I found that installing a new hard drive wasn’t difficult at all and I’ve detailed the procedure here so you can follow the steps. I wanted a new SATA hard drive so I had to check first if the motherboard would support it. Luckily I had kept the manual for the motherboard (Biostar NF4-A9A) and it showed that 4 SATA connectors were present. As you can see, the L-shaped mounts ensure you can’t connect the SATA signal cable the wrong way round. Here’s a photo of what the 4 SATA connectors look like on the motherboard

Remember that a hard drive needs two cables: a data or signal cable and a power cable. The old IDE ATA (or PATA) Maxtor hard drive has a 4-pin IDE or Molex power lead and a ribbon data lead. Here’s a photo of the two leads at the back of the hard drive – in the foreground the IDE power cable and on the far side the IDE data ribbon or cable.

So I ordered a new 1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive and two cables. A SATA signal cable would run from the SATA connector on the motherboard to the new hard drive, replacing the ribbon data cable which the old ATA hard drive used. I would also need a new lead to connect the old 4-pin Molex power cable to the SATA drive. Here’s a photo of the SATA signal cable and below it, the IDE to SATA power cable connector. I chose one which splits to 2 SATA leads so that if need be in the future, I can power a second SATA device

Before fitting the new drive and installing Windows 7 on it, you will have to ensure that the PC will boot from the DVD drive. If you know it doesn’t, you will have to change the boot order in the BIOS. Here’s a helpful guide to changing the boot order.

I disconnected all the external cabling from the PC (making sure I knew how to reconnect all cables – this is where a digital camera comes in handy). I removed both sides of the PC case as I would have to undo the four screws securing the old hard drive in its bay. There are usually two screws on each side holding the drive in place. I earthed myself by touching the metal chassis of the PC case to prevent any static discharge to electronic components (you can also use an anti-static wrist band) then I disconnected both leads from the back of the old hard drive making a careful note how they were connected if I had to reinstall the old drive. Again, a quick photo with a digital camera really helps here. I unscrewed the four screws and slid out the old drive. Then I connected the SATA signal cable to the motherboard and to the back of the new drive and connected the IDE to SATA power cable to the old Molex plug and then to the power socket on the back of the new hard drive. I then slid the drive into place and remounted with the four screws. Here’s two photos of the new drive in place with the two new SATA cables labelled

Then I replaced the sides of the PC, reconnected the external cables and that’s it. Put your old hard drive away for safe keeping – you may need it again if there’s any problem, but hopefully after a few weeks with Windows 7 you’ll be confident enough to fit it in an external drive housing, reformat it and use it for storage.

So we’re ready to power up and install Windows 7 now. I’ll go through my Windows 7 installation on the new drive in the next post.

My son is going back to college just now and needed to buy his first laptop so I tried to help out along the way. The first decision was straightforward – he’d used the Windows OS for years and was familiar with that, so it had to be a laptop with Windows. Not a MacBook because, even with student discount, this was beyond his budget and not a Linux OS because, well, because if you’re familiar with Windows it’s easier to stick with what you know, especially if you’re not tech minded. I’m just learning Ubuntu and would still struggle to help him out, especially away from home. Besides, buying a laptop with Vista Home Premium at the moment entitles you to a free upgrade to Windows 7 Premium, which by all accounts promises to be a great OS.

So off down to our major PC retailers to see what was on offer. First surprise, no Toshiba laptops in either retailer we tried. My daughter had bought a Toshiba laptop 2 years ago and we were all quite pleased with it. Ah well, so we had a choice of Acer, HP, Compaq, Packard Bell, Sony, Dell, Advent, etc. It was now that my son really surprised me. The first things I would look at when buying a laptop are hard drive size, amount of RAM installed, processor type, monitor size, but his first priority was build quality and design – the feel of the keys, the feel of the touchpad, rigidity of the case, etc. Some of the laptops had what I can only describe as bendy keyboard platforms which visibly sagged as you touched the keys – he didn’t like that, nor keys which seemed to be mounted poorly. He checked the feel of the keys as he typed. He also preferred a grainy-feel touchpad rather than the smooth ones. He pointed out that when his thumb or fingers were sweaty, they would stick on the smooth surface touchpad but were fine on the rougher surface. He also didn’t want the largest screen size laptops as this wouldn’t fit in his backpack and would be less portable.

So, at the end of the day, with all these points in mind and with a budget to stick to, he went for the Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop. Nice build quality, 15.6 inch screen, and 4GB RAM. The only slight downside was that the hard drive was only 160 GB. However, my daughter’s Toshiba has the same size and she manages fine – it forces you to be more organized and not hoard a lot of stuff. In any case, we spotted Iomega 1TB external hard drives for around £70 so that’s an alternative for storage when the time comes.

We then steadfastly refused all offers of Microsoft Office Home & Student, Norton Security, after sales help and insurance from the dogged salesman, paid up and left quite happy.

So what software should we put on it? Well, that’s coming up in Part 2 which I’ll publish in the next day or two.

What do you look for when you’re purchasing a laptop? Is build quality important or do you go for specs… or even looks? Let me know in the comments.

Image credit: brunkfordbraun

I’ve been following the tech scene for about 2 years now since I discovered tech podcasts. Although I had reasonable tech knowledge before this, mostly from browsing tech forums, I found that listening to tech podcasts and subscribing to tech blogs in Google Reader uncovered many tech tips and great advice, and some of the best tips keep coming up again and again. I’ve tried to gather together some of the best that I can remember. If you’re a geek you’ll have heard most before, but for the tech beginner, hopefully there’s some useful advice here. I’ve tried to keep each tip as short and concise as possible. Just use Google to get lots of additional info.

Essentials

1. First and foremost, back up your data regularly. This can’t be stressed enough. Sooner or later, your hard drive will die and you don’t want all your photos, etc to die with it. Back all your data up to an external drive, or to one of a host of free online services like DropBox. If you’ve a lot of data, have a look at Carbonite, a paid service. Better still, image or clone your hard drive regularly onto an external drive using a product like Acronis True Image so you can quickly get back up and running after a disk disaster. I’ve written a how-to on avoiding a disk disaster.

2. Second and also really important, always use secure passwords online: long and with a combination of numbers, letters and symbols, never dictionary words. Don’t use the same password on multiple sites. Use a program like LastPass to manage your passwords. It’s free and will also help with filling out online forms.

3. Have a rescue CD to hand so that if you are caught with a non-booting drive, you can at least try to get your data off. A Knoppix CD or the Ultimate Boot CD may do the trick. And before disaster strikes, make sure your PC will boot off the CD drive when a CD is inserted at boot-up. You may have to change the boot order in the BIOS so that the PC boots off the CD first.

4. Make sure you always have a firewall enabled on your PC.

Hardware

1. If you’re using the default router username and password, change them immediately. The default settings are all commonly known and listed here or here. So anyone with this knowledge can effectively hack into your PC if you have a wireless router and they are in range.

2. Uncheck all unnecessary programs launching at startup. To do this in Windows XP, click on Start, Run and enter msconfig in the box. Then click the Startup tab and uncheck any programs you don’t need at startup. Google any you are not sure of. Or use the excellent free utility CCleaner to disable startup programs. Click the Tools tab on the left then the Startup button. Revo Uninstaller can also disable startup programs through its Autorun Manager.

3. Get as much RAM as you can into your PC, 2GB or more if possible. Use the Crucial System Scanner to check what type of memory you need and how much you can fit.

4. Disable the annoying Caps Lock key. Here’s a short how-to.

5. By all accounts, many PC users, particularly in the US, seem to suffer from dust and dirt clogging up the fans, etc. and causing overheating problems which can damage your PC. It’s well worthwhile unplugging your PC, removing the side panel, taking it outside and carefully blowing out all the dust and dirt before you do permanent damage to your system. If you found a lot of dust, clean it regularly.

6. When using you laptop with the mains cable plugged in, take great care not to strain or loosen the power jack by for example by tugging or tripping over the mains cable. Treat that connection with great care. Once the connection shears from the motherboard you’ll only have hours of battery life left before a trip to your local computer repair shop is needed – and they mightn’t be keen on doing this type of repair.

Software

1. Firefox is a great multi-platform browser, particularly because of the vast amount of extensions which improve the user experience. Don’t load up too many plugins though or you’ll slow it down.

2. Don’t use the bulky Adobe Reader to open pdfs. Lightweight, free Foxit Reader is fine.

3. Thunderbird is a great multi-platform email client.

4. If you haven’t tried Skype, sign up for it. You can make free calls from PC to PC with this. If you both have webcams you can make free video calls – excellent for keeping in touch with friends and family abroad. Our daughter is away at college now and Skype is invaluable for keeping in touch.

5. VLC is a great multi-platform media player. It’ll play virtually anything you throw at it.

6. You don’t have to spend money on commercial software. Products like OpenOffice are really excellent, multi-platform free solutions and suitable for most things you might want to do. You can even open and edit pdfs in OpenOffice Writer.

7. There are many free utilities to convert Word documents to pdfs. I use doPDF which effectively prints your doc to a pdf file.

8. CCleaner is an essential free utility for a Windows PC for deleting temporary files, history, cookies, etc. Use BleachBit on a Linux machine.

9. Use the free utility Recuva to recover deleted files.

10. Revo Uninstaller is a great free utility that does a thorough job of getting rid of installed applications and the junk that they can sometimes leave behind.

11. Two great Windows anti-spyware programs are SUPERAntiSpyware and Malwarebytes. Free AVG is a good antivirus program, but if you’re careful where you go on the net, you may not need any of them – particularly if you’re using a Linux distribution as your OS.

12. Evernote is great for collecting web clippings, etc. Give it a try. Doesn’t support Linux yet though.

Online services

1. GMail is a great spam filter. Route all your email account inboxes through GMail. I’ve been doing this for over a year now and I find it almost never puts genuine mail in the spam folder and is brilliant at filtering out any imported spam emails. In addition, it won’t import any email when it identifies a virus in an attachment. Excellent.

2. If you’re search on Google isn’t getting the results you wanted, try searching for exact keyword phrases by putting your keyword phrase in inverted commas – or use the exact phrase box in Google Advanced Search. I use this a lot so I always have Google Advanced Search loading up in one tab when I launch Firefox.

3. XMarks is great for syncing your browser bookmarks between all your PCs.

Operating systems

1. By all accounts, Windows 7 is going to be a great OS. Upgrade to it when you can.

2. Don’t be afraid to try Linux, particularly Ubuntu if you’re a beginner. Although things are done slightly differently from Windows, it really is well worth trying out and it isn’t hard to use. You may well decide to switch from Windows afterwards. You may be able to use Wine to get some of your favourite Windows programs running on Linux.

General

1. If you have to put your email address on your website, make sure to cloak it so it’s not picked up by spammers. Use a service like HideText to do this. Better still, use a contact form on your webpage.

2. Subscribe to @makeuseof in Twitter for lots of useful info on web applications and services.

3. Subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog!

That’s all I can think of for the moment – I’ll come back and add additional tips when I think of them. Drop a comment if you have a great tech tip to share.

Oh and by the way, if this article has whetted your appetite for tech tips, have a look at David Pogue’s great article (and the comments) for even more useful tips.

I bought an Acer Aspire One ZG5 netbook a few weeks ago. This model has the 120GB hard disk, 1GB RAM and runs Linpus Lite Linux, a Fedora-based Linux distro. Reading around various forums, it seemed a number of people were having problems installing software on their Aspire One running Linpus so I thought I’d install a Ubuntu distro as I already have an old desktop PC happily running Ubuntu 8.10. I had seen a blog post by Knightwise some weeks ago on his favourable experiences installing Easy Peasy Linux on his Acer Aspire One so I thought I’d have a go with this too. Easy Peasy is the new name for the UbuntuEEE distribution. It’s a Ubuntu Network Remix (UNR) of the standard Ubuntu release to enable it to work better on devices with small screens such as netbooks. It installs Firefox with Flash and Java, Skype, Google Picasa, Songbird etc. out of the box and Knightwise had no problems with the installation on his netbook and seemed quite pleased with it.

I’m going to go through the steps I took to install Easy Peasy, aimed at the new Linux user, like myself. I believe quite a few inexperienced users will be ’sold’ this netbook/Linpus combination because of its price (somewhat cheaper that the Windows XP version) and the straightforward user interface and then may well run into problems when they try to install software. So here goes. It might look a bit daunting but it’s quite straightforward when you work through it.

Before you start, you will need two USB sticks or thumb drives and access to a desktop PC with a DVD optical drive because the Acer Aspire One doesn’t come with an optical drive. The USB sticks must be configured to use the FAT32 file system. If necessary, to change the file system of the USB drive, you just need to right-click on the drive icon in the My Computer screen and select Format, then choose FAT32 for the file system. Of course, reformatting your drive means nuking any data on it, so save whatever you need first. You’ll need a 2GB USB drive for the Linpus recovery drive and another 2GB drive for the Easy Peasy install. Once you are happy with the new Easy Peasy install, you can overwrite the USB stick with the Linpus install. You can always recreate it again from the DVD if required.

So first, we have to create the Linpus recovery USB stick should we run into problems with the new Easy Peasy install. You may have already done this when you bought your Aspire One, if so skip to the next section.

Creating the Linpus recovery USB drive

Your Acer Aspire One should have come with a Recovery DVD. Put this in your PC’s DVD drive and plug in the first USB stick. Reboot the PC. Your PC should boot from the DVD (if it doesn’t, you’ll have to change the boot order in the BIOS so that the PC boots from the DVD first). To enter the BIOS, you’ll need to press the Delete or F1 key (depending on your PC) while the PC is booting.

Once the PC has booted off the Linpus recovery DVD, choose the option Create USB recovery drive. Follow the on-screen prompts to select the USB drive. Takes about 3 minutes to create the Linpus recovery USB drive. Then remove the DVD and press Exit. Leave the USB drive plugged in. The PC then reboots back into Windows.

Check the boot order on your Aspire One

To check the boot order so you can boot your netbook off this USB stick, plug the Linpus recovery USB drive into one of the USB ports on your Aspire One. As the netbook is booting, press the F2 key for the BIOS setup. You’ll see the prompt on screen as the netbook boots. Go to the Boot menu, select your USB drive and use the F5 key to move it up to position 1. Press F12 to save this set-up and exit.

The netbook will now boot off the USB drive and you can reinstall Linpus Linux onto the netbook hard drive from here should anything go wrong. If your USB drive is unplugged, your system will boot off the hard drive.

Creating the Easy Peasy USB drive

Now we’re ready to create our Easy Peasy install on the second USB drive but first we have to download the Easy Peasy iso file. Boot your Aspire One with no USB drive attached, open your browser and go to the Easy Peasy website. Download the iso file to your Downloads folder. It’s about 860MB so may take a couple of hours to download depending on the speed of your internet connection.

To install a bootable copy of this iso file on your USB stick you will need a bootloader program. I’ve used UNetbootin and you can download it here. Make sure to download the Linux version. Again, download to your Downloads folder. You’ll need to make UNetbootin executable. In the File Manager, highlight the file and go to Properties, Permissions tab and check the box against Allow file to be run as a program.

Now, when I double clicked UNetbootin, I got the message: UNetbootin must be run as root. Use:

sudo /mnt/home/Downloads/Unetbootin-linux-319

But when I tried this command in the Terminal, I was advised I needed to install the programs mtools and p7zip.

To add these programs, I first enabled right click desktop menus by clicking on the desktop, selecting the Behavior tab and under menus, checked Show desktop menus on right click. Then right clicking on the desktop, I chose System and then Add/remove programs. This runs pirut which needs your admin password. I searched for the software I needed to install: mtools and installed it, then p7zip and installed it. I found I also had to install p7zip plugins before UNetbootin would run.

So back to the terminal window and type:

sudo /mnt/home/Downloads/Unetbootin-linux-319

Click Disk Image, keep ISO in the drop down box and browse to the Easy Peasy iso file in the Downloads folder. Select your USB drive from the drop down box then click OK. Easy Peasy Linux will now be installed on your USB drive. Once installed, close all windows and restart the netbook with the Easy Peasy USB drive in place.

The netbook will boot off the USB drive and you can now install Easy Peasy Linux. On the partitioning screen I chose Guided – Use entire disk as I didn’t want to retain the old Linpus install on a partition.

I’ve been running Easy Peasy for a couple of days now with no problems. Connected to my wireless network without problems and straightaway I could share files with my Windows PC over the wireless network. YouTube videos play without problems and Skype is loaded ready to go.

And that’s about it. Hope this guide is clear enough to get you through the install. If you found problems following it, let me know and I’ll update it. Although I’ve used an Acer Aspire One, the procedure should work to install this Ubuntu distro on any netbook. If you found it useful, please Digg, Stumble, tweet or bookmark on Delicious using the links below.

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