Okay, so I tested an iPad for a while, but I just can’t get used to the Apple way of things. They don’t make it easy to handle documents; it’s all about media — every medium except text. The iPad would not reliably connect to any cloud storage except its own. And that Apple cloud storage was painfully hard to get into from any other device. It is very truly a walled garden.
I still needed a second device with my primary computer, and I was contemplating another Android tablet when I received a hand-me-down laptop — HP 15t-dw300. You can look up the specs, but it came standard with an i5 Intel CPU, 8GB RAM, and a 256GB NVMe drive.
It was cranky on Windows 11, which is why someone gave it to me. I wondered if I could get Linux to run better. I tested several different distros and things just would not work right. I put it aside for a while, then remembered I could run a hardware self-test. I looked it up and on HP laptops, that’s F2 right when you power up. I believed that either the drive or the controller was not behaving properly, but the self-test came up clean.
I booted into the latest release of Mint on a bootable USB jump drive and took the time to run GParted (partition utility) first. I deleted all the existing partitions. The run of different distros had made a hash of the file system, and it was still looking for one that had been replaced twice over. Once I deleted all the existing partitions so that the whole drive was unallocated space, I was able to install Mint without any balking at all. Further, it booted back up cleanly.
The only flaw is that the 3.5mm headphones jack does not work as advertised. The headphones get nothing and sound keeps coming out of the speakers. I had to add an adapter to the headphone to plug it into a USB port, upon which Mint immediately switched the sound output.
It’s running just fine for now, and I intend to keep it that way. This will be my mobile device. All I need to do is purchase the added service so I can have unlimited data on tethering my cellphone and I can use this machine anywhere. And it will work for my uses a whole lot better than any tablet could.
Sometimes God provides things in unexpected ways.
Goid thing you went with Mint. Many other Linux distros don’t bundle the wifi drivers and then you have to download them on another machine and copy them over vis usb. Much better a headphone jack problem than no wifi.