We love our Apple stuff, and have, for the most part, only good things to say about their products. When rare problems have occurred, we’d just walk into an Apple store, and a “genius” would fix it, or as was the case with Phill’s iPhone in Miami, replace the device altogether.

However, with our recent laptop (macbook air) meltdown, our current stage of Apple support involves shipping the laptop back to Apple, so they can take a look at it. Trouble is, you have to ship it in a special “Apple box”, which Apple won’t send outside of North America.

So, short of jumping through a lot of hoops, we were a bit stuck getting the laptop back to Apple, and then back to us, and were as a result, without for the foreseeable future. We decided that was unacceptable – remember it’s our phone, TV, connection to the outside world – so we found another solution.

As luck would have it, our neighbours in the marina have access to a car, and they’re out fishin’ most days, so they generously let us use it. Timing couldn’t be better, as we’ve been having trouble with flat tires on the bike lately.

We’re told that people drive the livin’-you-know-what out of their tires around here, until they disintegrate and the wire and fabric guts end up all over the road. Well, it’s the tiny wire guts that seem to be finding their way into our tender Dahon innertubes. The very helpful guy at Nautique Sports in Grace Bay explained the disintegrating-car-tire-theory to us, and recommended tubes with self-sealing slime in them – we can’t avoid the wire bits on the road, but at least the tubes seal up on their own now.

So we use our neighbour’s car, the day before yesterday, I think, to drive around Provo to find a replacement laptop. There are not many stores that sell laptops in Provo, so the selection is limited, especially considering we didn’t want to spend much money. The closest we got to a maybe was a $400 hp at a pawn shop, but as Phill says, “it ‘ain’t a deal if it’s a headache”.

We were down to the last store on the island (Music Man), where we found the Acer Chromebook C7, which is very cheap and runs on Chrome OS. Basically, when you boot the computer, you have to sign into a Google account (or “browse” as a guest), and the “desktop” that appears is just a collection of shortcuts to the big Google apps – Chrome, YouTube, Gmail and Google Search. As far as I could tell, the “operating system” was just like a browser (which I guess is all you need for cloud computing, if you speak Computer Buzzword). We wouldn’t be able to install Skype, and Chrome OS wouldn’t recognize our Internet Do-Dad for some reason.

So the price was right, but the operating system was wrong. We searched the Internet for a solution, and fortunately, there are people out there like Jay Lee, who has made the free, open-source, Linux-based Ubuntu operating system work for the Chromebook. Incidentally, Ubuntu is a South African philosophy meaning “humanity towards others”.

So we bought the Acer Chromebook C7, made no modifications and watched a Dexter that night (yipee – we had our TV back!). The next day, I went to the Green Bean coffee shop so I could abuse their WiFi to download and install the new operating system to make this cheap little netbook into something that could actually replace the macbook air.

I work in IT, but to be honest, installing a new operating system over a feeble WiFi connection from the command prompt is not really my bag, so I was intimidated getting started.

There were a couple of times I was worried I’d really fouled it up, but following Jay’s instructions, I managed to fumble through…

In total, the download was about 1 GB across over 50 files.

It took almost all day (and a large coffee, a large blueberry smoothie, a caprese salad, another small coffee and finally a Presidente) but now we have a very functional, if cheap, little laptop.

We can edit photos, videos, etc., Skype (not tested yet) and use our Internet Do-Dad, just like before with the macbook.

We’re back in business, and feeling much Ubuntu.