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@Charlie: IIRC you were looking for a CMOS battery a while back. Did you ever find one, and if so, where?

I’ve managed to gently pry the CMOS battery in the Acer off a board (it was glued on), but don’t want to unplug it until I find a new battery. I have found only one place that sells the battery, an outfit called Rome Tech
(rometechcases.com) but am hoping to find some other places as well.

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Charlie

My 2 old laptops – the HP and Acer, both referred to above in my posts – both run LMC 22 just fine, the only issue being the slow boot time for the Acer. Both came with and still have the original 4GB RAM. I’ve only found a couple places that have RAM for these computers but since they run well as they are now, I’ve never pursued it; both are used as test machines and as computers of last resort. They both also have 500GB SSDs, which replaced their original 320 GB HDDs. The SSDs make a huge difference in speed.

My guess is that your (@Charlie) old Sony will be fine. You can always put a LMC 22 iso on a usb flash drive, boot up the Sony with it, and see how it runs. It will be on the slow side since it will be running off a usb drive, but you should be able to see if there are any features you use/need that don’t work. If something doesn’t work you may only need a driver and the Driver Manager can probably handle that.

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jburk07, Charlie

Doesn’t the 5.4 kernel on Mint 20 go out of support in April 2025? That’s what my daily driver running LMC 20.3 says. It also says that the 5.15 kernel goes out of support in May 2025. But maybe that’s only when the 5.15 kernel is paired with LMC 20.x?

Mint 22.1 is in beta now and it may well be ready by March.

Also, FWIW, I’ve installed Mint 22 on two other computers in addition to the Acer laptop that’s the topic in this thread. Those other 2 are a 2009 HP Pavilion laptop, and an out-of-support 2017 macBook Air. Neither has any issues of any kind. The macBook Air just flies through everything – far faster than any version of macOS that was ever on it. The HP isn’t nearly as fast but it’s still respectable. It has no boot issues, and it’s speed seems comparable to the Acer once the Acer gets booted up. The HP – like the Acer – now has an SSD in place of the original hard drive; the SSD makes a significant difference in speed.

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jburk07, Charlie

The battery looks like the first picture in your link, and according to the service manual is glued to the system board. I might spend 10 minutes trying to get it out but if I can’t I may just live with the slow boot. After all the computer is 15.5 years old, and I use it as a test machine for updates and trying out new versions of Mint. And so far at least, once booted the computer runs perfectly – no issues with the time and date, and none of the other symptoms that apparently often go along with a failed or failing battery.

All the connectors are tight. I’ll check out the BIOS.

I’ll check out the battery, but I think I wasn’t clear about the BIOS screen. The Acer splash screen and the screen with the BIOS access keys (the latter screen is actually a splash screen for the Insyde H2O BIOS – I think that’s the right name although it seems nonsensical to me) are exactly the same now as they were when the laptop was running Mint 19.3 and 20.3, and for that matter, when it was running Win7.

Go online and try to find a service manual for your laptop. The manual should tell you how to access the battery. Every laptop I have has one of two types of battery: 1) external that you can easily remove by flipping one or two slideable tabs on the underside of the laptop and then sliding the battery out. These batteries are encase in hard plastic and likely won’t show any distortion; and 2) internal batteries that can usually be accessed by removing the underside cover on the laptop, usually by removing some philips head screws and gently prying/lifting the cover off. These batteries typically have something that looks like a foil pouch that will look puffy when they expand and these can exert enough pressure to warp the laptop case or leave a gap between the monitor and keyboard portions of the laptop when the laptop is closed.

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J9438

I don’t use an app for backups; given the state of most software these days (frequent updates and bugs), the fewer apps/programs I need to rely on the better. I NEVER store anything in the cloud.

If my system crashes to the point of being useless, I just reinstall Mint from a bootable usb thumb drive. I keep 2 such drives and test them periodically to make sure they boot.

I backup on an as needed basis and do it manually. If I generate an important or hard to replace file I’ll copy it to a thumb drive or external usb drive. Otherwise I’ll back up every couple months or so to a thumb or usb drive.

It’s a simple system that probably won’t work for everyone but it works for me. In the last almost 8 years of running Ubuntu and/or Mint I’ve never had to reinstall the OS (I wish I could say the same for macOS and Windows, but why would I expect trillion dollar corporations to put out a reliable product?!)

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Microfix, bassmanzam, Slowpoke47, Charlie

Batteries can swell and still appear to function normally. Open the laptop back and visually inspect the battery for swelling. Swelling does not always manifest itself with easily detectable case distortion. Set the laptop on a flat even surface and see if it rocks at all.

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J9438

Once again I will submit a somewhat different experience. Never had a BSOD, but I did have a grey screen of death on my 2017 iMac when it was running High Sierra and I was installing a security update. It was fixed easily enough by forcing a shutdown with the power button, waiting a couple minutes and booting up again with the power button, whereupon the update installation resumed successfully.

I’ve installed 2 printers on the iMac, an Epson AIO, for which I downloaded software from the Epson website, with no issues. A Canon AIO was not recognized by the iMac and hence not offered any drivers/software. At the time the only software for the iMac on the Canon website was for a macOS version 2 or 3 versions older than High Sierra (Yosemite IIRC). Fortunately that software worked fine.

I installed the same 2 printers on the macBook Air in the same manner as above. Unfortunately the installations got wiped out when I upgraded from Mojave to Catalina; I never bothered to reinstall them.

All this happened several years ago on Intel processors. Hopefully things have improved with newer versions of macOS and the so-called Apple Silicon.

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peterb

I suggest buying the most expensive macBook Air you can afford. You’ll want the larger capacity SSD and more RAM that you’ll get for the money. The macOS updates come out roughly every 6 to 8 weeks and tend to be about 1.5 GB. I’ve got 2 2017 Macs, an iMac with 8GB RAM and a 1TB HDD, and a macBook Air with 8GB RAM and 128GB SSD. The iMAC is a total slug with updates; it takes 1 to 2 hours, typically. The SSD on the MBA makes a huge difference as it typically takes between 30 and 45 minutes. I don’t think you can buy a Mac without an SSD anymore, so that’s good. I’m not sure whether you can easily upgrade RAM or SSD after you buy a Mac. Some models are upgradable but others aren’t, so don’t buy with the intention of upgrading it later unless you know it’s doable.

Also, don’t go into buying a Mac with the idea that everything will be a bed of roses regarding updates and patches. My MBA has been relatively trouble free, but on 2 occasions an update resulted in a significant slowdown in boot times. It seemed to fix itself after the next update but it was a definite annoyance. On my iMAC the software updater failed a couple times making it impossible to install an update. None of the “solutions” I found on the internet worked, and I ended up having to figure out how do to the update manually, which in my case was fairly difficult to do – quite a bit harder than just going to a MS catalog and downloading and installing a Windows update (at the time there was no standard place from which to download an update; the app store didn’t have it nor did any Apple site purporting to be a software download site, but I finally found a non-Apple site that did, although it was as I recall more than just an update – it was an entire point release of the current macOS). I also had an issue when the support for High Sierra ended and I wanted to upgrade to the next version, which was Mojave. No matter what I tried Apple would not let me do that and I ended up being forced to upgrade to Catalina. So much for having control over my computer.

Nothing in the preceding paragraph is intended to start an argument with folks who contend that macs “just work”. I’m sure they do for many people just as I’m sure for many people Windows “just works”. I’m just saying what my experience has been. For a bit of context, I don’t consider myself to be a techie, but I do consider myself to be several notches above “Joe User” (no disrespect to Joe intended).

IIRC requiring a PW after the screen locks is the default setting.

Ooops! I said there was a link and then didn’t post it. Here it is:

https://www.google.com/search?q=free+computers+for+low+income+seniors&sca_esv=2e484b4e376f015d&source=hp&ei=QLZUZ-3yMMiCm9cPoLmayA0&iflsig=AL9hbdgAAAAAZ1TEUFzfIHUvvBqJ4Jx-ANcEe9WYLIsH&ved=0ahUKEwjtktnPxZaKAxVIweYEHaCcBtkQ4dUDCBo&uact=5&oq=free+computers+for+low+income+seniors&gs_lp=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&sclient=gws-wiz

Monthly updates come out the second Tuesday of the month which is December 10. I’m sure there will updates.

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CR2