Salvaging a password protected laptop

I had the task of trying to resurrect an older Dell Inspiron laptop.  Unfortunately, somebody set a hardware password on the BIOS.  Unlike a desktop, this is not a simple matter of setting a jumper to erase the password.   I was stuck.

Then I thought, if I could install Windows Vista on the laptop hard drive with another machine (in this case a Dell desktop),  I could then pop the hard drive back into the laptop and see if it would boot with the reinstalled Windows Vista.  Unfortunately, I got the blue screen of death.  No luck.  I suppose if I could get my hands on a similar Dell Inspiron laptop, this could work.

However, I then thought of trying Ubuntu Linux.  I took out the laptop hard drive again and hooked it up to the Dell desktop.  I installed Ubuntu 12.04 LTS using the Dell desktop. LTS stands for long term service release and this means that version (relaeased in April 2012) will be supported for five years (until April 2017).  Ubuntu Linux releases occur every 6 months in October and April.  Every 2nd year, there is an LTS release in April. Then I put the hard drive back into the laptop and booted from Ubuntu Linux.  It worked.  I had to let it get software updates.  Some of the usual annoyances occured:

• needed to get VLC Player so it could play DVDs
• needed to get the propietary driver for the wireless network card
• needed to update Flash from the Software Centre so it could play Youtube
• needed to install IcedTea with the Firefox plugin so Java applets could run.

The last point was a real pain.  I tried Open JDK and it still didn't work with Firefox.  I installed Chromium hoping it would work with that browser, but it didn't.  Finally, I installed Iced Tea JRT.  It worked.  When I double clicked on a downloaded jar file to run it, security issues prevented me from running the jar file.  So, I had to set the properties of the jar file to executable and then it worked.  This is why Linux isn`t more popular, but now the hooped laptop can be used to surf the net and LibreOffice can be used as the office suite.