You almost certainly don’t remember but back in 2009 I published a series of articles detailing my travails getting Linux to run smoothly on my then-new Samsung Q320 laptop. Well you’ll be pleased to know that eight years on I’ve finally solved all my remaining issues:

  • The fan randomly spinning up and down
  • The “always-powered” USB port not working
  • General sluggishness

The first two can be fixed by downloading the 06LH BIOS update from July 2010. Maddeningly this can only be installed from Windows. To fix the third problem I swapped the original magnetic disk for a modern SSD (really easy), and at the same time temporarily installed Windows 10 and applied the BIOS update. Then I dd-ed my old disk over the SSD using a USB-SATA adapter.

I’m really happy with the result. Running Debian Stretch everything Just Works and with the SSD it’s pretty speedy. At the moment I’m using it whenever I go home to visit my parents.