Thinkpad R500
=============

I spent  several evenings  in vain  attempts to fix  the Windows  on my
wife's Lenovo Thinkpad R500. It not  the best nor the fastest notebook.
But my  wife wanted a  valid replacement for  her R61 machine  (the R61
died recently). She wished to have a good keyboard and a big screen.

The machine we got has a big screen bud the keyboard has issues: the Fn
key makes strange sounds (but it works) and the "3/#" key is dead (also
the F1-F4 block is useless but is is  not a big deal for her).. This is
still OK. But the OS behaved strangely  - it randomly opened a help and
refused to put it in background. It also started many Internet Explorer
windows randomly. I tried some tricks  like making of new user accounts
but nothing worked...

So I have  replaced it with the  Ubuntu 16.04 (I had it  prepared on an
USB flashdisk  so I have used  it) and installed the  MATE desktop (the
same that my  wife uses on her  main computer). So far  it works better
than the previous OS.  Of course the computer is not  too fast with the
Ubuntu -  at least  when compared with  my Blackbird -  but it  is fast
enough. The  1.8GHz Celeron and 2GB  of RAM make it  much more powerful
than the poor old R61, though.