I recently was got my hands on an old Toshiba Satellite Pro 4600 (model PS460C-04NVX)

My plan was simple: Install the latest version of Ubuntu on the system so I would have a Linux platform for mobile development, and install Windows 2000 on a second partition so my wife could use the laptop for her accounting (very few professional accounting packages exist for Linux).

This turned out to be a far more difficult endeavour than I had hoped, so I’m going to chronicle my tribulations here in case they ever do anyone else any good.

First, I should mention the gotcha that caused me the most headaches and caused me to decide to write this journal. I could NOT get the wireless card working under Windows 2K, no matter how hard I tried. All diagnostics said it was fine, but it could not scan for networks and it certainly couldn’t connect to any if I gave the name of my local home wireless network.

I eventually discovered that the culprit was having upgraded to SP4. Microsoft has a Knowledge base article that describes what caused the problem and how to fix it. One quick edit of the Registry, and I was able to detect networks just fine in Windows.

— TO BE CONTINUED —

My wife has declared the laptop “good enough” and confiscated it so she could get some work done. I’ll continue this article when (or if) I get the thing back and can attempt to solve the various problems encountered.