are windows XP safe to use?

G'day RCO,

Yes, sounds pretty grim for your Toshiba - no BIOS (or anything?) on powering up is a bad sign. CPU failure or power-supply? Probably even beyond Puppy 's rescue capabilities .

Pity, as your laptop has/had plenty of ooomph to run Linux according to the specs you linked to.
And they're more than any computer I have .

I once had a work desktop which blew its power supply and fried the hard-drive, so "faecal matter occurs" - luckily daily back-ups were being done so it was only a minor inconvenience for all - except the accountants.

Keep smiling.

David S.

 

Thanks, David. I've googled loads of stuff about how to get around the Microsoft lock out of Windows 8 and sadly, the are many disgruntled folks like me who've been left with an expensive useless lump because of the OS design flaw.... Or was it a deliberate flaw?

 

G'day RCO,

Sometimes I'm glad I have only 'old' computers.

Yes, it does look like MS pressured computer manufacturers to set the BIOS to lock out anything other than a Windows system - I wouldn't want to suggest a discounted Windows 8 OS cost was an extra incentive for them.
If the 'lock-out' was on just the hard-drive then I imagine a full drive wipe (or a new drive) and you'd be fine to install any OS and boot up. I've done this quite often on salvaged/donated hard-drives of the XP era - some supposedly 'unusable' but really just with XP screwed up.

There are quite a few links to installing Linux (e.g. Puppy) onto a working Win8 computer ..... as long as the BIOS is amenable.
e.g. https://www.winhelp.us/recover-files-using-puppy-linux.html
Looks like the Windows info was updated in 2017 but the Puppy version suggested here is quite old (from about 2012?).

PuppyLinux: UEFI (Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface) may be of interest as Toshiba is mentioned near the end.

Obviously, re-flashing the BIOS is something else that time and MS have passed us by.

So I agree, you may have a "Babylonian" computer - where bricks and clay tablets were first invented.

David S.

 

G'Day mate!

Yes, it seems my Tosh. is SNAFU. Even the bios is inaccessible!

 

This is why I own a made-for Linux system 76 laptop. No one should ever be told they Must have window$ by locking the bios down with safe boot

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

Thanks for the link btw.

 

I,ve cracked laptop bios locks before, my guess is there is probably a way to open it up if your motivated enough.

 

Perhaps, but I found nothing to use from Google or YouTube. Any suggestions would be welcome, either in this thread, or message me. Thanks. Toshibas seem to be a breed apart when it comes to entering bios.