What I learned from a Cranky old Laptop (Frankenstein)
No, I don’t use a Mac or the Image you see above (That was just to get your attention 😉), I used a laptop which was abandoned and found under a refrigerator in my friend's shop. He never believed it would ever work again, it was a Dell Lattitude D520, old but still had some hope left in it, it became the first laptop I ever got my hands on as I spent the last 2 yrs dismantling all the component of my Pentium 3 desktop computer which I bought with my secondary school savings, I thought to myself, “this one should not be bad”.
After so many trial and errors, it finally came on (I was so excited that day), I realised the ram, battery, keyboard and screen was bad which led me to improvise, in the end, it didn’t look much like a regular laptop but I was proud of it, when people saw it they thought it was a laptop I stole from hell itself for it to still be working (That was where I gave it the name Frankenstein 💀 the rugged).
I must confess it was quite a challenge, I had to carry an external keyboard, extension wire and a mouse in my bag knowing it was only going to work only with direct power supply, but it was this very laptop that thought me web development at my beginner stage, waking up at midnight (that was the only time NEPA brought their light) to watch video tutorials I collected, I tried installing Window 7, 8,8.1, down to 10 and I didn’t care about the speed at that time cos I couldn’t wait to see how it was going to look like until I discovered Ubuntu which made things a bit faster.
I carried the heavy languages in my bag everywhere I went, mostly at Co-Creation Hub where I learnt allot from the community, Adeniyi Temidayo used to call it my workstation because of the way I display everything on the table and how heavy my bag was.
Along the line, I found another abandoned Dell (are you thinking what I’m thinking pinky? 😁), it was a good opportunity to perform another operation on it, after spending hours trying to fix it, “the operation was successful (as doctors will say), it was at least better than the last one but was still a Frankenstein (Image Below) to me.
I went really far with this one even though it also had no battery life, it lasted just long enough to shut down at least. The thought of not carrying a bigger workstation in my bag was a huge relief. I got too used to Frankenstein that lost sight how much life it had left to give (Died on 28th Nov 2017 at Google UX masterclass, was so angry that day 😠).
Some People still believe, when they get a badass laptop they would become badasses, but what I’ve learnt so far was that you do not need to get powerful laptop to start learning, I know what it took me to learn this far no matter how slow it was.
Even when I have no laptop at the moment I will keep learning with someone else’s or find another scarp to fix.
I hope somehow you might have learned a thing or two from this. so use it for as long as you can until you can get a better one.
May its BIOS rest in Chips 😭
