Refurbing a Toshiba A45-S150

My friend asked me to fix his laptop as it seemed to have a virus on it. Well after a boot I found not only virus trouble, but lots of out-dated, useless software (mostly AOL crap that I know is painful to get rid of). He said I could do whatever was needed, so I decided the easiest path would be to reformat with Puppy using gparted and then perform a reinstallation. I decided to partition the HD to allow installation of XP (ntfs) and linux (ext3) so after doing this with gparted, I proceeded to install an old copy of XP I obtained. It had a license key with it that was supposed to work :) but alas I have had to find a workaround.

A bigger problem with this job was losing all the toshiba drivers including those that run the network adapter. I spent a few minutes searching and finally came across this forum thread:


http://laptopforums.toshiba.com/

Which pointed me here:

http://www.csd.toshiba.com/

This was critical as I was S.O.L. with most of the hardware on this machine without these!

So now I just need to get any other drivers deemed useful, deal with the activation, SP2 and SP3 upgrades, WGA issues and all that jazz. (yes windoze is a pain).

After the couple hours needed for all that, I'll take 30 min. to do a Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (lucid lynx) install just in case the other system goes to shit!

p.s. I figd out activation (FFX Madman), however it may have interfered with installation of MSOffice 2007.

Sony Vaio MotionEye Drivers

Somehow I managed to get the "motioneye" webcam working in windows 7 pro. I originally recieved this laptop with Vista installed and upon upgrading the webcam was not working. Basically I installed all the updates and then went to Sony's "esupport" page and searched for the model printed on the bottom (PCG-5K1L) which returned a different list of models. I chose the one with "EN" at the end and then installed the "Cam" driver for Vista (but I'm running 7? Right!) and it worked after that.

Now I am curious if I can make the webcam run in Ubuntu Linux (while I'm waiting around for a network upgrade to 10.04 LTS). I ran lsusb and found the driver info:

Ricoh Co., Ltd Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC6 [R5U870]

Now I think I may be able to get some headway according to this site:

http://www.arakhne.org/ricoh/

back for an update...

Update:

Installation of 10.04 took ~2 hours over a wireless connection (a bit slow, but I had other things to do anyway). It will take some time to see what kinds of advantages, upgrades, etc it really adds, but I expect to be fully satisfied.

After that I installed the following files from the above URL.:

ricoh-webcam-r5u870_0.11.4-0arakhne1_i386.deb
ricoh-webcam-r5u870-firmware_0.11.4-0arakhne1_i386.deb

Then I tried "cheese webcam booth" software and verified the motioneye webcam works!