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In the first part, someone suggested an outboard sound card. I've actually had one for about fifteen years, but can't find the power supply; I haven't needed it in a decade.
        At any rate, the next morning I realized that I actually already had Broadcomm Bluetooth drivers, in the dongle’s install CD, so I uninstalled the Bluetooth drivers that were installed, and installed drivers from the disk; or rather, the network drive I had copied them to.
        Apparently the old Bluetooth chip doesn’t support the new drivers. So I again uninstalled the Bluetooth drivers, disabled the Bluetooth chip, plugged the dongle in, and installed the drivers yet again, rebooted, and...
        It was worse than before, as if it had no Bluetooth whatever. A look at the device manager showed why—it only showed the disabled internal chip, and not the dongle. Stupid Windows!
        Time for Linux. I went to the Kubuntu site and downloaded the ISO. As it was downloading I scrolled through Facebook and discovered a post from Lulu saying that they had just done a huge site redesign and there may be trouble.
        Half of my books seemed to be missing. I wasn’t going to be installing Linux today!
        A couple of hardcover books were listed as paperback, and with the hardcover’s prices. A couple led to 404s. I did a search on Lulu’s site for one missing book, searching for its ISBN, and was led to some book by someone else.
        Fortunately they were still for sale at Barnes & Noble and Amazon, so I simply changed the “buy” URL on the books’ pages.
        By then I had forgotten all about Linux, running across a magazine article about the Roman Plague Emperor, who was a philosopher. “Hmm,” I thought, “I haven’t added any new books to my site in a while, and a philosopher’s musings about a plague Rome was enduring was pretty timely,” so I went to Gutenberg; it should only take a few hours or so to format it for the site.
        There was a problem: it was almost unreadable. Darmok at Galadra. It was translated a few hundred years ago, and the language was more archaic and obscure than the King James Bible. And it got worse; each page was littered with archaic words, many of which I needed to look up in more than one dictionary because it was missing from Webster’s and OED. One word Google couldn’t even find. On top of that it appeared that whoever scanned it left all the OCR errors in. There were a lot of words starting sentences that weren’t capitalized, and words that were that shouldn’t have been. And every speck of dirt on the scanned page became a comma, making it sound like William Shatner playing James Kirk, and far less readable; “The koala eats, shoots, and leaves.”
        I decided to edit it and make it my own, making the unreadable prose readable, understandable, and if I do it right, maybe a pleasant read. I’ve been working on it all week, and am about halfway through the first pass.
        But yesterday I remembered the Bluetooth/plug problem again when it annoyed me trying to find some music among all the commercials every radio station was playing, so I burned the ISO on a DVD and started the Linux installation.
        Or thought I was. I couldn’t find the right key to get to the BIOS; I’ve seen F2, F9, F10, and F12. So I looked it up on Google. I changed the boot sequence to start with the DVD and exited. Windows started booting. WTF??
        My bad, the DVD tray was open.
        When it got to the part where it was ready to write to disk, there were only two options: try Kubuntu, or wipe the drive and install it. This was really unusual. I started using Linux when Mandrake came out a couple of decades ago, installing different distros on different computers, but every single time I could either use the whole disk, or dual boot.
        I shut off the power, opened the DVD drive and rebooted, just to make sure that I hadn’t trashed Windows, and it came up all right. So I closed the drive bay and rebooted. Half an hour later when it had only been at the opening Kubuntu screen, it reverted to text mode and displayed an error message that seemed to indicate that it couldn’t read the DVD.
        Maybe it just got too hot to read, I’ve seen that before. I hope so, if the DVD has gone bad it will be hard as hell to install Linux, since it will have to be from a thumb drive, and I’m not sure it’s possible on this machine; I saw no external drives in the BIOS’ drive list.
        At any rate I shut it off to let it all cool and decided to watch Star Trek, so I went to “Movies” on the TV, went through to the directory where the movies are stored, and Star Trek was gone.
        Damn. Star Wars was there, but not Star Trek. So I got on the computer, since the TV sometimes misses things, and it really was gone. So I plugged in my backup drive, which now has four full-system backups. The most recent backup was missing Star Trek. I finally found it on the oldest backup, started the HP back up since it has a network jack, the Dell only has Wi-fi.
        It will take days to copy all those movies and TV shows. So it will be a while before I start the next attempt at getting Linux on the HP.