About the funny laptop
The "funny laptop" is the nickname I have given to one Packard Bell EasyNote TE69BM laptop. It had Windows 8.1 preinstalled, with all of that sweet, sweet Packard Bell bloatware to boot. Said bloatware, of course, included the legendary WildTangent Games App as a Win32 program as well as a Metro-style app, alongside a handful of free trials that happened to include Peggle Nights - probably the single best thing to come from the factory experience!
About a month into having this laptop, however, I replaced the mechanical hard disk with a solid state drive and then proceeded to install Fedora Linux with KDE Plasma, which is where it's at now. This is especially nice as there is no way the funny laptop is going to run Windows 11, and it's otherwise actually decent enough to become secondary to my main laptop, despite being unable to play many big video games.
The day of the funny laptop
In late March 2024, I set aside one day to find out just how good this laptop would be as a secondary, by literally forcing myself to use it instead of the main laptop, not touching the main laptop even once during the day. I documented the highlights of the day over on wetdry.world. In short, I learned that it is indeed usable, though somewhat held back by the processor.
Two more small issues!
There are, however, a couple more problems. First of all, it appears that the current charger has lost the ability to... you know, charge,
so at some point I'll have to buy a replacement to be able to use the laptop on battery. I had previously bought a new battery assuming that was the problem,
which of course turned out false.
The next issue is a fault of part of the laptop itself - the DVD drive tray will not eject itself. I have no experience with this kind of hardware so
unfortunately I may not be able to fix this problem on my own.
There may be more to come
The funny laptop adventures are never over! Although this is all I can cover here for now, I will make sure to update this page as the circumstances of this laptop change, likely in tandem with a fedi post or two.