small victories: visible and replacement lappie running

general delivery

My mail forwarder couldn’t drag their feet forever and finally shipped my consolidated package on the 3rd business day after I requested it.

Picked up the package from a tiny general store with the USPO co-located inside.

dell 7280

The little laptop was in as-described condition and booted right up.

windoze

It came with Windoze 11 on it, which will generally go unused. I resized the 256GB drive to allow Windows only 50GB with the rest going to linux. The resizing was painless.

dual-booting linux

I booted a Live USB to Linux Mint Debian Edition, as I am not fond of Ubuntu-based distros.

It installed, rebooted, and was usable in eight minutes.

getting settled in

It took me a couple more hours to get everything set up the way I like it, including installing TLauncher+Minecraft. All is well.

power

It seems to pull ~40w when charging and running, and ~20w when just running. Not quite as power-sipping as the chromebook, but it has more horsepower, 2x the RAM, and 16x the drive space. I’ll use the Dell as my “daily driver” and drop back to the chromebook when power is really tight.

visible

Activated the Visible SIM in the Motorola phone. I don’t know if the Visible app is strictly necessary but I did use it to activate.

After that was setup up and confirmed working I moved the SIM over to the Cudy router. Followed the instructions on the Amazon listing page and it came online in a few minutes.

There are no guarantees Visible won’t disable the SIM b/c of the router, but I am not acting like a jackass with it. If it holds up for another 14d I’ll turn off autorenew on the US Mobile SIM and keep it in my back pocket (so to speak).

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