This procedure worked for me.  There is no guarantee that it would work for you, and you use these instructions solely at your own risk.  As always, back-up your data and remove the battery before fiddling with the insides of your computer.

The underside of the P1630, with battery removed, is shown below:

The drive bay with the cover removed is shown below. The drive is covered by a plastic sheet, and it’s the four foam-rubber pads at the edges of the sheet that holds the drive in place.

Every muscle, every sinew, every fibre of your being will scream that it isn’t so, but you just need to lever up the disk drive to be able to take it out (taking care not to damage the flat cable connecting to the drive):

After you disconnect the flat cable from the drive (another moment where you wonder exactly how much force will be “enough” force), you can take the plastic/foam-rubber combo off the old drive, put it on the new drive, and do the reverse procedure to reassemble the P1630 with the new drive.

The net result is (a) I will be paying a lot more attention to doing my own website backups in future; (b) I’m busy scraping pages from the WayBack Machine and Google’s cache to remake the web sites; (c) the graphics don’t feature in the caches, so they’ll take longer to get back; and (d) this blog’s styles disappeared along with everything else and is now using the current default. You probably won’t miss the blog styles all that much, but losing them left WordPress in a state where it was both configured to serve RSS and not configured to have the RSS link on the pages, with the result that it threw an error on each request and didn’t serve anything. Finding and fixing that just added to the effort.

So while the websites are mostly back, it will be a while before they’re pristine again. The http://www.mentea.net/ website design is due to be revamped real soon now, anyway, but I still need the old content in order to transfer it to the new layout.

Here’s how:

• For each of six business cards, fold the business card around another (template) business card to make a square middle section with each end of the short edges of the card folded up.  It helps to keep the square square if the short edge of the card you are folding around is aligned on the long edge of the card you are folding (easiest when you have a seventh card for use when folding the sixth card).   It also helps the tightness of the finished cube if you make the folds as close to a card’s height apart as you can.
• Assemble the cards as shown below.  Each successive card is added at right-angles to the previous cards so the folded short edges of a card fit against the long edges of other cards.
  The cube is shown being assembled on a flat surface for the sake of clarity, but sometimes it’s easiest to hold the partially assembled cube in your hands as you go
• If the assembled cube is just a bit loose, it can help if you gently press the edges and faces of the cube as you move it around in your cupped hands for a while.  I’m not sure why it helps, except maybe it helps if the faces are slightly concave, and it certainly won’t help a terminally loose cube.

Three days, six-or-so Linux distributions, and many installs later, I’m back on the original OS but with a different X driver.  So far it’s been stable, but there had previously been times when it was stable for days on end between the times when it would crash with extreme rapidity.

The distributions I tried were:

• SuSE 11.04 – Claims improved multihead support, which is why I started on the reinstalls, but the initial install reliably froze minutes after setting the display to span both monitors.  Reinstalled again with the Nvidia drivers, it worked okay but the fonts were nearly unreadable and it didn’t include some of the programs that I rely on such as backupninja.  Nor does it ship with xmlroff.
• Ubuntu 10.10 — Wouldn’t install, failing one of two different ways each time I tried it.
• Xubuntu 10.10 — Wouldn’t install
• Debian 6.0 — Installed okay (several times), comes with xmlroff, didn’t lock up any of the times it was on the machine, and comes with many of the programs that I’m used to, but the purity of its approach meant that it didn’t come with everything that I wanted, and I lost patience with trying to coax Skype and the like to install.
• Ubuntu 11.04 alpha 3 — Installed with an error message then wouldn’t boot after installation.
• Ubuntu 10.04 LTS — The beginning and the end of the cycle (and a short interlude in the middle).  If it stays stable with the different X driver, I’ll keep it, otherwise I try Ubuntu 11.04 after that comes out later this month.

The time of day when providing a service is secondary to billing for it also drifts a little. Their technical support’s best advice? Turn the modem off then on again at the time that’s least disruptive so the daily dropout hurts less when it happens every 24 hours (plus drift) after that.

I’ve finished the twelve-month term for which I signed up so now I’m shopping for a new ISP. And I know one question I’ll be asking the next one.

The previous title was from a comment by Shakespeare about the effectiveness of blogs, but this time the title comes from playing with reading a domain name. To retrofit a quotation, I’m reduced to ruining and taking out of context a well-known line from A Dictionary of Modern English Usage by H. W. Fowler:

Display of superior knowledge is as great a vulgarity as display of superior wealth – greater indeed; http://inasmuch.as knowledge should tend more definitely than wealth towards discretion and good manners.

Maybe it’s this innate netizen-of-the-worldliness that prompts many kind people to offer to share their inheritances with me.  Though I do worry about my health, since there must be a reason why I also receive offers for so many different pharmaceuticals.

The netbook form-factor was important to me long before the term “netbook” was a twinkle in a marketing person’s eye, and the P1120 did sterling work on Irish trains, Belgian buses, and numerous economy-class air journeys where a larger computer would be more of a hindrance than a help.  The P1630 continues the tradition, though even it was nearly defeated by the minuscule space between seats on Ryanair last week.

By the benchmark that’s most important to me — the time to compile xmlroff — the P1630 is about seven times faster than the P1120.  Though I still call it takai, you do mostly get what you pay for (at least, that is, until Moore’s law makes a mockery of any price/performance ratio).  I haven’t compiled xmlroff on a netbook to benchmark it, but I was working on Xcruciate last week side-by-side with someone using an EeePC netbook, and the P1630 was comfortably faster on the same tasks (though sadly not to the same proportion as their respective sales prices).

I can’t report on the other useful benchmark — the number and size of the Emacs frames that can fit on the screen — since it seems that Ubuntu and/or X.Org doesn’t yet handle the P1630′s Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 4500HD.  When I use the “intel” driver, the screen just flashes different colours, and when I use the “vesa” driver, I can’t get the full 1,280 x 768 pixel resolution.

Other quibbles are that the touchscreen doesn’t work out of the box with Ubuntu (and I’ve yet to try to make it work) and that Skype doesn’t work with the microphone (either internal or external).