Better Laptop Option?

Does it look like this:


left is HDMI .. right is displayport

I had to look up the SCART thing, we never had that in the US. It looks like its a lot bigger than displayport.

 

hah! Loads bigger. It actuall doesn't look like either. It looks very similar to HDMI, but when I went to plug my HDMI cable into it one day (thinking it was an alternate HDMI port) it wouldn't fit. Of course, it has symbols trying to tell me exactly what kind of port it is, I didn't look too far into it. It's quite similar to an HDMI port, but just shy of it. Probably some sort of display port that just didn't last. I could have sworn I hooked an HDMI cable into it before. See how the HDMI hookup is beveled diagonally though? It's just like that, only at 90 degree angles. And being 90 degree angles, also accepts a standard USB port.

I miss my laptop :bigcry: this one is so slow!

 

and it was for video for sure? i wish i could see it. maybe it was some proprietary "port" that breaks out into several other connections via some vendor supplied (proprietary) cable? and it accepts a usb cable, in the same port/socket?

 

I'll upload a picture of it later if I can. I'm almost positive it is a video out port. There weren't any additional cables supplied with the laptop or anything related to it in the HP store at the time I purchased the laptop (like... 7 yrs ago). And it does accept a USB cable in the same port. I want to say it was faster too, as far as USB transfer rates go, but I believe it was still a USB 2.0 port. The plastic insert within it is gray, while 3.0 is blue?

 

USB 3 is usually supposed to be blue, but it wouldn't have to be. USB 3 has extra signal lines that former USB standards didn't. I've seen combination e-sata/usb ports ... e-sata is only slightly bigger than usb though, definitely not bigger than hdmi size.

 

Get a surface pro.

 

Get a Macbook or something that supports FOSS from a non mainstream manufacturer (cheaper than Macs). Also, older Dell or HP models, or developer edition models. Linus Torvalds likes his chromebook, because it has "very good pixels" which is very important to him. Of course I'm sure his chromebook is hacked to the point that it would no longer be considered a chromebook by "normies" kek. He doesn't use it for most of his development work though AFAIK right now (last I heard he was "working on it", that is working on making the chromebook into what he really wants it to be), I think he uses some old laptop model I'm not sure.

I guess it really depends on what you want, not everyone has the same use case (despite what the mainstream laptop manufacturers seem to believe).

Steer clear of Microshaft .. as nice as some their mobile devices seem.

pm me, or ICQ if you really wanna talk computers.

 

could it be an E-SATA port by any chance?

 

http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom

 

One thing I wanted to ask was,

My laptop is 5+ years old, slow. Real slow. Our familes first computer ever blows it out of the park. This takes 20-30 to rip a cd..
Anyhoo I head that I could reformatt it, clean it all back up. But as with a laptop from a shop everything was pre loaded and I've never ever been given driver installs discs with a laptop so have never reformatted one before. I heard that if i reformatt c: and erase it all the computer would save the files I needed to load the correct drivers for the correct hardware I have on board.

This is actually a reason why I'm no confident in buying laptops anymore, because i have reformat my pc and had the driver cds and so it was easy, I'm not sure what I would do if i had to reformat to put them back on.

 

forget about reformatting ... just overwrite zeros to nuke all sectors, make partition table and install linux and a light weight desktop environment and you can probably get a few more years out of that hardware Also, linux filesystems perform far better than Winblows file systems, especially when it comes to reads/writes to many small files or fragmented files scattered all over the disk.

 

Okay, but let's say I was reformatting, then:

 

Modern operating systems are pretty good at providing drivers for common hardware, anything else you can go to the vendor website and get the driver. Btw reformatting doesn't actually remove any data, it only touches something like 1% of the disk (just overwrites the filesystem and inodes with a new filesystem)... Just wipe nuke it and install new OS from scratch, the operating systems you are likely to install will create the partitions and format them for you.

a lot of that "pre loaded stuff" is crap, diminishes your performance and have privacy, security concerns. I prefer to only have software installed that I actually want, I don't want useless clunky crap softsre lol. I use a text based keyboard driven appointment manager/calender/todo list program ... does what I need it to do and nothing more. Small fast and not unnecessarily complex.

 

hmm. thank you. I just don't know what I am really doing so "nuke it" doesn't sound like something I want to try and do. lol.

 

it means overwrite every disk block with zeros (or any other type of garbage, like random bytes or crypto garbage) ... it's basically like starting with a brand new hard drive, no operating system or data whatsoever. Do be warned, back up anything important before you do this, because once this has been done, any data recovery or forensic techniques will be absolutely impossible ... not even the N5A could help you get the data back (and if anyone tries to argue this wearing a tinfoil hat ... I have read the several academic papers on data recovery techniques from magnetic media and can back this up)

 

Download linux, make bootable USB flash drive. Boot from usb flash drive and install from that. And do read the manual first, it's generally a good idea I recommend Ubuntu for linux newbies, it's fairly easy to setup and install automagically compared to other distros (which often use text based installers requiring you to setup and align your partitions and such yourself), but otherwise is capable of being just like any other distro pretty much ... after all it's just a debian fork.

If you use a "live" linux OS, that is a linux OS that is portable and can run the operating system straight from the USB drive itself, you can do all this low level stuff using that before doing a permanent install to your hard drive. You can even make "live" linux USB flash drives, that are portable and encrypt them ... and if you're really hardcore or paranoid about security you can use two factor authentication by storing the encryption key file on a seperate usb flash drive (or maybe a micro SD card would be better, they are easy to snap in half if needed rendering them broken and useless), which means that not only do you need the encryption password (which is hashed and compared to the encryption key .. the password itself isn't actually stored anywhere, rather hashed to generate a key, usually 256 bits long), but you also need that seperate USB "key" ... meaning even if someone found out your password, they couldn't do shit unless they had the flash drive with the actual key on it. Kinda like having a door with two locks, with seperate keys or something.

 

Usually you just download an ISO image, which is usually what's referred to as a "hybrid ISO". Just copy this image straight to the flash drive, and I don't mean copy it into the filesystem, I mean write it to the block device itself, not a partition or file system (the image file itself contains the partitions and filesystems needed, as it is a binary image). some people like to use

dd if=somelinux.iso of=/dev/sdx
, but I find just using

cp somelinux.iso /dev/sdx
more elegant and there's really not much difference, dd isn't really any more low level than cp ... do note that when I say

/dev/sdx
the x may be any letter, depending on what block devices are installed in your system .... do check with

fdisk -l
(need superuser privilages for this) to find out which device filename is the usb drive and make sure you are writing to the correct device (or else disaster will quickly ensue and you will most likely get pissed and want to break things if you happen to corrupt some other hard drive.)

you can also do tail -f /var/log/dmesg, and when you plug in the flash drive you will see it show up in the logs.

There are tools that can do this from windows, you'd have to google it because I don't remember the names of the tools, but you can also usually burn the same image to a CD or DVD and boot from that, although the loading and install will be slower, due to the fact that reading from CDs is a lot slower than a flash drive, but with the CD you don't have the problem of needing linux to make a linux bootable USB drive.

The ubuntu website (and pretty much all linux distros) are well documented and have manuals and instructions on how to install, but if you do it as I said you will most likely not have problems. I also recommend using a USB 2 flash drive, not a USB 3 drive, as some computers have issues with USB 3, especially booting from them (and then you have some computers that have trouble booting from usb at all because the BIOS doesn't support it properly, in that case you have to use a CD/DVD)

If you have trouble, go into BIOS/UEFI setup, disable "secure boot", and change the boot order of devices, or override to make it load from the USB stick before trying other devices. If you still have trouble try fiddling with the secure boot CxE option if it's available. And if you have any more trouble than that I suggest taking the offending hardware outback and putting a few .40 rounds through it

usually it's ESC before post, or F2, and sometimes DEL to enter firmware setup program, and usually another key like F9 to show boot menu of devices to boot from ... but this varies depending on the hardware/firmware of the particular computer, but it should be in the computers manual ... usually I can figure it out by hitting all those keys in rapid succession at POST to "bruteforce it" so to speak if it's a computer that I don't know.

The cool thing about "live" operating systems, is that you can plug it into any computer and boot from it ... especially useful when using computers that aren't yours and don't particularly trust or think may be security compromised or malware infested, keyloggers etc.

Linux can read any filesytem, microsoft ntfs, apple HPFS+, and the many many linux/unix filesystems, but it's interesting that windows and macs can't read linux filesystems, and in fact windows cant read Mac OSX filesystems, and MacOSX can't read Windows filesystems but linux can read anything (meaning a USB drive formatted with a linux filesystem won't even show up when plugged into a windows computer, and they won't see anything at all , but vFAT is the most portable filesystem that every operating system supports, but it isn't a particular good filesystem besides being the most portable.