[Swlug] Freeing space on my SSD

[Rhys Sage]

The laptop I'm thinking about doing this on is an E203MA which is pretty much an 11.6" tablet with a keyboard. Limited ports 2xUSB A, 1x USB C, 1 X hdmi, 1x MicroSD and a headphone jack. I'm tempted by the bigger SSD idea. I'm also aware this is a 5 year old laptop.

Acpi -v tells me: design capacity 5000 mAh, last full capacity 1650 mAh = 33%. so the battery is not that great. Mind, this is used more as a desktop than anything else. With a battery that's clearly almost conked out, I'm wondering whether it's worth changing out the SSD (if it''s even possible).

My other laptop is an Asus E410MA with a 14" screen and 64GB SSD. Thinking about the problem I'm getting with lack of disk space, nothing I have on the disk really requires a lot of speed in access. The browser downloads folder could easily be transferred to an SD card. The desktop and documents folders could well be dumped to an SD card too. 

Given the state of the battery and the age of my laptop, I'm wondering now whether spending $50 on a SSD upgrade might be money wasted. I had an old IBM Thinkpad that I got secondhand about 20 years ago. Within 6 months I'd had to replace half of the internals as each bit failed before eventually the mainboard failed and I flogged off the bits I could for whatever I could get (which wasn't much) and tossed the rest on a bonfire. Similarly, my 2007 macbook went through a process - the battery failed so I bought a new battery. Then the disk drive stopped so I bought an SSD then the graphics card went out so I stopped throwing good money after bad.

It might be that I would be better off transferring to the 14" laptop but doing a fresh install on the 14". At the moment that has Linux Mint. I have used Raspbian on it before and liked Raspbian though I think that has been replaced with straight Debian these days. 

The second laptop was always intended to be an in-car laptop. Now my work location has changed and I don't spend much time in my car, that's not as essential to have. I might be better turning the 14 inch laptop into my desktop and getting a new small laptop such as the L210 (with a 128gb ssd) as my car laptop. That  leaves my e203ma with its dicky battery almost as a spare. I suppose I could put Windows back on it and try the Arduino Windows software. The L210 is $200 so not outrageous and not really that much more than the SSD replacement for the E203MA.

I'm an oddball - I like A4-sized laptops. I'm pushing thoughts around right now. I have to say I really like the Asus laptops.