If you are in need of a second computer and you are not afraid to (1) use the command prompt to tell your computer what to do every now and then and (2) look stuff up on the internet when you find yourself in a pickle, you may be a good candidate for buying a used computer and installing your own frugal (what’s more frugal than free?) operating system.
What you need to do to accomplish this goal is to head down to Akihabara and find yourself an old IBM Thinkpad laptop with no operating system. I was able to find one the other day for about 22,000 yen. Mine is an X31 and it has 512MB of RAM and a 40GB hard drive. Since I am using it as a second computer, not my main beast, I don’t mind slightly low specs. I also had to pony up 8000 yen for the base so I could have a DVD drive. Other kinds of computers may work, but I have been told that IBM Thinkpads interface well with the kind of operating system we are going to use here (Ubuntu, based on Debian GNU/Linux, a popular Linux distribution), so if you aren’t sure what kind of computer to buy, go with the Thinkpad.
(Linux is a free Unix-type operating system originally created by Linus Torvalds. There are many different flavours of Linux, but if you are not already familiar with Linux/Unix, you should probably stick with Ubuntu for now. You can always try other distributions later.)
Once you have your new-used computer, go to the Ubuntu website, download the latest stable version of Ubuntu and follow the instructions for burning an ISO image onto the disk.
You can also get a free Ubuntu disk sent to you, but that will take quite a few weeks, so if you have a decently fast connection to the internet and you are able to burn a CD, it will be faster just to make one yourself.
At this stage, if you have not done an Ubuntu installation before, I would recommend that you order some pizza and invite your geekiest friend over to walk you through the installation and basic setup. It is quite an easy process, but you will appreciate having a helping hand to walk you through some of the options if you don’t know your bits from your bytes. That said, since you are dealing with a computer with no operating system installed, if you want to give it a try by yourself, you can’t really do much harm. Then you can resort to the pizza bait trick if you find yourself in trouble. Just stick the installation disk in and start answering the questions. The whole installation will probably take less than half an hour.
Once you have your operating system up and running, and you have hopefully managed to connect your new-used computer to the internet without any problems (and have downloaded and installed all the updates), you can go online to find out how to make your DVD player spin disks from any region or how to input Japanese characters, amongst a myriad of other things. You will probably find free open-source software that will allow you to do everything on your Ubuntu machine that you are about to do on your main machine. Just remember to install the Linux version of the software on your Ubuntu system, not the Windows or Mac version!
This solution works well if you already have one computer that has a Windows or Mac operating system and you just need another computer for odd jobs (like watching DVDs from other regions or checking email in the morning before work). You can use proprietary software like MS Office on your main computer and then put Open Office on your secondary computer for when you just need a quick and dirty word processor to get the job done.
If and when you find yourself in trouble, just do a search for whatever ails you and you will be sure to find that someone else has dealt with the problem and was kind enough to write up instructions for how to fix it. I have found that sometimes the first few hits in the search engines show me really complicated ways to fix the problem, but that if I dig a bit deeper, I can usually find a simpler answer. Don’t despair if you find some answer that doesn’t even seem like English because of all the computer jargon. Go back to your search results and see if someone else was kind enough to give it to you in language you can understand.
(If you have never worked with Unix/Linux/Ubuntu or anything similar before, you may find the
Ubuntu Pocket Guide useful.)