So, I’ve been writing a 175k word One Piece fanfic for about 6 months. Most of my writing is done on a 10 year-old laptop I dug out of the closet while I wait for my kid to finish sports practice. Today, the hard-drive died. (Thankfully I have a cloud backup.)
Now, without a laptop, I have nothing to continue working on. I can’t afford a new laptop. Just glad I didn’t lose all my work.
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An older thinkpad goes for 100-200, they have crazy battery life and are kind of rugged.
But I guess you can go even cheaper if you’re on a shoestring budget.
When i couldn’t afford a new computer, i went out and got one of those raspberry pis. you need to have and external mouse, keyboard and monitor, but the “computer” itself is relatively cheap. I think you can get a one for something like 50 bucks. You have to load it with a lightweight os like ubuntu mate, or something with lxde as its desktop environment.
that, or you could go the more pretentious route and get a typewriter.
Buy a 2.5 inch SSD and install your favorite OS in it?
Model number?
I’ve been writing a 175k word One Piece fanfic for about 6 months.
Imma pause you right there. I’m in the middle of writing a dissertation and from the bottom of my heart struggling to find the words- fuck you. 175k in 6 months? I have good days writing 175 words. Fuck you. I wrote a scifi book that is around 75k words and it took about a year to get the draft done.
Writing is hard, i written three novels each about 80k words. Two novels at 100k that are total crap. Also have 4 short stories, and that’s not mentioning the 20 novels I need to finish.
Writing well is hard.
Writing is easy, there’s nothing to it. You just sit at the typewriter and bleed. -ernest hemingway
It’s much easier to write your own version of a copyrighted material than to creatively write on your own. My work is fanfiction based on someone else’s ideas. Yours is all you and I envy that.
I always found fanfic easier to write because someone else did huge amounts of world building for me! I don’t have to describe say, Luffy’s powers because the person reading it ideally watched or read One Piece and knows stuff! Same with prestablished relationships.
175k is still insane! Best I did was 50k for nanowrimo like a decade ago for the Garrett Investigates fandom.
Expressing admiration at other people’s achievements is good, but you don’t need to diminish your own through comparison. Writing is a bloody difficult endeavour, regardless of the specific context. OP has mentioned that in their view, it’s easier to write lots when you’re basing it off of an established work, but even beyond that, different styles of writing have different objectives.
Completing the draft of a book in a year is an impressive achievement that you should feel proud of, and I think we should use our shared understanding of how difficult it is to make something to build up ourselves and other creators.
Have you tried writing on a 10 year old laptop?
That’s the secret
It was already mentioned that you can swap your hard drive /SSD easily and pretty cheap, but you can also use an old thumb drive and install a bootable USB version of Linux to test it out. While not ideal, this is probably a free since you may have an old USB thumb drive laying around.
Allows you to test Linux as well as test the rest of the laptop hardware to make sure it’s working properly (if the USB booting works well, it’s probably just your existing hard drive.
If it’s just the hard drive and you have a screwdriver on hand, SATA SSDs are extremely cheap. You can get 256GB in the US for $20-$25.
Or of the laptop has a serious hardware fault and is beyond repair, then pick up a keyboard from a thrift shop for a couple of bucks and type on your phone.
Or if it is just for the purpose of using a word processor, then any ancient laptop can be picked up on Facebook marketplace. I can see plenty of decent options listed in my area for <£50 (I appreciate this may be a lot to spend for some though).
This is the answer here. If OP has any techy friends they should tell them. I have a dozen HDDs and SSDs and RAM of varying sizes lying around. Most of them even work.
I tend to canabalize parts as computers pass through my hands. I frequently upgrade family member’s laptops for them. They buy the parts and I provide the labor of cloning windows and putting in the parts. Often the brand new (but smaller) ram/ssd are unwanted.
It’s the OS license that’s the main problem.
Meh just install Linux and carry on with libreoffice. Ubuntu is easy and free
There’s a non-zero chance the license is stored on the motherboard of the laptop (ie, embedded in BIOS).
It’s nearly certain. OEM activation has been stored on the motherboard since XP. XP-7 required a matching OEM cert (easily found online), while 8+ have a unique license in the BIOS. For these, you just reinstall the OS, skip the key during setup, and let it connect afterwards for all of the updates and whatnot.
Now, licenses to other apps, such as Word, are not so simple.
Powershell
irm https://get.activated.win/ | iexThat should be fine. I haven’t had to do it but everywhere I’ve seen says it’s tied to your hardware and it should be fine when you reinstall windows. Though with a dead laptop I’m not sure if you’re able to get a USB with the bootable media.
Your license is tied to the laptop.
Windows should remember the BIOS and activate fine, I think. And as posted below, you can extract they key if that doesn’t work.
You can get the install medium on a USB stick from Microsoft for free.
There’s probably a sticker with the license code on the laptop somewhere.
I know I’m summoning a horde, but even a new HDD needs an OS and I’m not a Linux person. Not sure I can find the license for Windows 10, because this old brick won’t take 11.
It’s super easy to activate Windows for free, and Microsoft doesn’t care: https://massgrave.dev/.
If you were logged in with your Microsoft account before, that should also restore your real previous activation.
Seconding that massgrave is legit. I remember that I was nervous when I first installed Windows through this method, but I used it for years, across multiple different devices and never had any problems
You don’t even have to feel bad about it either! As Microsoft once said, Windows 10 is the last windows operating system. Sounds like you already owned that, so you’re good.
I’ve even contacted MS support before telling them I wasn’t going to buy windows 11 as I paid for 10 and they said that was the last version. They gave me a new key no questions asked.
I thought 10 keys worked for 11 anyway. I’m pretty sure you can still use 7 keys if you try hard enough
Just install Win10 anyway. Only caveat of not activating is youre stuck with the default wallpaper
Are you able to physically replace the HDD (preferably with an SSD)? If so, you can use the (Win10) Media Creation Tool to create a USB installer.
When it prompts for a key, just skip it. If you have an OEM mass activation laptop (i.e. anything from a major brand), it’ll activate automatically after. If, for whatever reason it still doesn’t activate, you’ll have a nag screen telling you to activate. It won’t significantly limit what you do.
Horde here. If you get any Linux OS with KDE plasma as desktop it’ll feel pretty much the same as Windows, if you’re not a computer person you’ll likely not even notice the difference. Install the KDE version of EndeavorOS for example. Horde end
Linux - if all you need is to write in a word processor Linux is easy. If you want to custom everything it’s harder. Browsing or writing text should be easy.
You can also just not activate it. There’s nothing stopping you from using the computer with the water mark. It’s not like XP which was super picky and would legit lock you out. Vista + just makes it kinda ugly but it works.
I’m not a Linux person.
[X] doubt
128GB are even cheaper, some in the $10 USD range.
If all you do is web browsing and word processing, that’s more than enough.
Ask your friends if they have an old laptop (or desktop, if that’s acceptable) lying around. It’s surprising how much old tech people have stuck away in their closets these days
I’m going to have my wife ask around. I don’t do social media, but there’s bound to be someone with a used laptop I can buy. Good idea!
Ask your friends and family as well. Someone has an old laptop/desktop from school or an old job stuck in a closet. A lot of people give up when their machines become too slow, but they don’t bother with basic maintenance to see if that will speed it up: virus checks, uninstalling un-needed programs, clearing caches, defragging the hard drive, etc. I have one friend ditched a PC because it ran too slowly and when I checked it out they had two antivirus programs competing with each other, making it impossible to do anything else. Other people take the fact that the battery or charging cable died as a signal to get a replacement.
I wrote a too-long 300K Avatar fanfic! And I’m low key writing another!
Would recommend.
I dunno if you are already doing this, but you should publish it one chapter at a time. It will get way more visibility, and create more feedback as you write.
And there are relatively affordable ways to get the laptop it working again, or get writing on a phone via a usb keyboard or something like that. You’ve come to the right forum!
I just published to AO3. I put up about a dozen chapters because the format is better if you upload the story arcs together. No feedback yet, but my kid likes it, which is great
Awesome! I know nothing of One Piece, so probably can’t give any useful feedback, but may read some time anyway.
Though be aware you may not get a ton of comments. I suspect Ao3 readers are generally into shorter-form stuff (and smut) these days, and I’ve been told some would-be commenters are ‘afraid’ of antagonizing the authors, more or less.
You can add a Bluetooth keyboard on an old android phone, could work for just typing. Or a normal keyboard and use an otg adapter
Or a USB one, sometimes!
Goodwill have these for next to nothing.
Where are you writing this from?
My tiny phone
Idk how infuriating this can be without work lost and such an old laptop. What part of it died? Might be an easy fix. Used laptops are more affordable than you think at a local ecycler. Where I am I could get a laptop or desktop for around $100 dollars and probably no older than five years.
Regardless that I can’t tell the quality of something labeled as fanfic, writing 175k words of anything is an achievement!
I would say it’s mildly infuriating
Ikr. I would be mediumley furiated if my laptop suffered any issues that caused substantial downtime. OP states cloud backups, so they’re good for data. But you can’t use that data without a device.
I mean, how long should a laptop work? OP said it was pretty old, these things happen. I totally understand wanting to keep what you have going as long as you can, but hard drives have a lifespan and it’s usually around 3 years of constant use. SSD are a little better but flash still ages. Not ideal but at a certain point you kinda gotta accept that it’s not long for this world if you don’t do maintenance.
It’s what if style recreation of the entire East Blue arc of the Anime/Manga centered around original and remixed characters. It’s involved a lot of creative content that I workshop with my kid after practice. It’s really helped us to bond. Now, without the means to write down our ideas, it’s difficult to keep the momentum going.
I don’t understand that first sentence, but doing this to bond with your child is amazing! I highly encourage you to have a second backup location of this! That’s almost two phd’s of writing!
That’s awesome actually. It sounds like a fun thing to do with a kid that’s into it too.
Can I be a minor character gesturing rudely at the anthromorphic prophylactic and declaring “Arlong did nothing wrong”?
