TRON-Inspired Videos
Saving Tech from the Trash: A Surface Book for TRON
When I save a computer from the trash, I always think of TRON. And today's rescue is a good one.
I repair computers for a living, which means I end up with pieces of unfixable tech to dispose of. Fortunately, we have an electronics recycling center nearby that takes busted TVs & computers, which prevents this stuff from ending up in the landfill.
Trips to the center are for me nostalgic. When I gaze upon an old inoperative computer, I see a realm of unbounded creative possibility cut short. As if burdened with a digital Sixth Sense, I see dead programs.
In a way, like Tron, I fight for the users; i.e. the owners of these computers, when I try to prevent their machines from ending up here.
But I also fight for the programs, and it saddens me to see a computer discarded too early, to see its programs get derezzed because the user thought it easier to move on.
Sometimes it's a fairly new desktop all-in-one that just needs a new power supply. Or a nice laptop with a busted but very fixable hinge. In such cases, I will often bring the computer home to revive it, to find a new purpose or new user for it, to rerez its programs for another microcycle.
So imagine my delight when on this trip, I found a Microsoft Surface Book 2 in excellent condition that apparently wouldn't turn on because ... well, that's what they're known to do if their firmware hasn't been updated and their battery isn't completely drained before plugging it back in! So I brought it home, gave it some fresh electrons, and it came back to life!
The Surface Book is a unique combination of laptop and tablet, having a detachable reversible touch screen and batteries in both the screen and keyboard portions. The one I found is a 2017 Intel i5 7th gen dual core with 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD. Not very impressive by today's specs, and it doesn't officially run Windows 11. But using Rufus to install Windows 11 Pro worked great, and made this otherwise older computer more usable than ever before!
Most especially, the Surface Book has an exceptional screen and build quality. It features a 3000x2000 pixel touch screen that has a higher DPI and brightness than my 2021 MacBook Pro M1 Max! And a Surface Book is known to be great for digital drawing when paired with a companion Surface Pen.
After installing updates and verifying that its batteries and hardware were good - in fact excellent - I wanted to try it out as a digital drawing tool for my TRON-inspired storyboards and sketches. So I bought a Surface Pen on eBay that magnetically attaches to the case, downloaded the Leonardo drawing app, and set to work.
What I discovered is that the versatility and drawing ability of this machine is amazing. This free find plus $80 for a pen and software has proven to be my most fulfilling rescue in rerezzing old tech, and has become a most useful tool for creating TRON stuff.
It feels so good to see such a useful computer and its programs updated and back in action. I hope you draw inspiration from this rescue. Keep on communicating with your programs through the I/O towers of your computers as you travel the circuits of digital creativity! Like the man says, there's no problems, only solutions!
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