Hardware

I’ve been resisting making this page for a while–it’s always seemed unnecessary. But I’ve decided that I could grow used to saying “Computer X had Y happen to it,” and have one place where people can learn what Computer X is.

Dell Latitude D610

My main computer–it has 512MB RAM, a 1.79 gHz Pentium M processor, a 40GB hard drive, and one of the better laptop keyboards and mouse buttons I’ve used. It dual boots Jaunty and XP, and claims that its battery lasts three and a half hours (an eternity by my standards, though to be honest I haven’t run it down to the metal yet).

Sony Vaio PCG-TR3A

A beautiful little laptop with 512MB RAM, a 1.0 gHz Intel Centrino processor, and a 40GB hard drive. It dual boots Ubuntu and XP, has an amazing battery life (well, for being five years old), and had an until-recently amazingly bright TFT widescreen. Which cracked and died.

Dell Inspiron 8100

512MB RAM (sound familiar?), 1.0 gHz Pentium III, 20 GB hard drive, nVidia GeForce2GO (16 MB memory). It runs Mythbuntu.  The screen is approximately the size of Rhode Island, but started to lose bands of pixels around the edges, and now has a faulty connector. Ergo Mythbuntu.

IBM Thinkpad 390E

This is without a doubt the best thought-out laptop I’ve seen in my life (including everything that comes out of Apple), and also one of the cheapest: $5 at a garage sale (with no power cord, hard drive or RAM…but still…).  The processor isn’t overwhelming (366 Mhz), and it’s currently borrowing the Gateway’s hard drive (until I can hit up eBay), but it’s a great size, has great keys (and a pretty nice keyboard layout), has fold-out feet to tilt it up, 256 MB RAM (wow!) and a physical screen brightness slider and volume wheel. No more being dependent on drivers downloaded from ibm.com. No more only having things work right in Windows (or after pain in Linux). No more only being able to use things when the computer is turned on and booted up. If I don’t want sound–I turn the wheel. If I’m on a battery, and want to save it, the brightness is down from BIOS to bootup. The power switch is also on the side, which grows on you. As for operating systems, it had Jaunty, CrunchBang, USE, SliTaz and Arch, all of which had assorted problems. And now it’s chilling with XP until I muster the courage to tackle Arch again.

It’s also my favorite laptop from a cosmetics point of view–I hate the streamlined, white-or-silver, curvy-licious design so common in Macs and Vaios, and it has (along with the Gateway) a nice combination of a practical size and form, size but not bulk, and, thankfully, the color black.

Gateway Solo 2150

It has 64MB RAM, a 433 mHz Celeron processor, and a 5.5 GB corrupted hard drive (Xubuntu and FreeDOS both refuse to use it). When I first got it, it had Windows ME on it, but years of Windows’ bloat made it unacceptably slow. So I put Linux on it–first Ubuntu GTK 1.2 Remix, then Puppy. Then it went through a nasty XP phase (before I realized StarCraft’s networking worked in Wine), and now it’s loaning its hard drive to the Thinkpad. I plan to put the lightest distro that supports Wine on it, which will take some research.

So as not to break the trend, I feel obligated to tell you that it has a straightforward LCD screen, which works perfectly, but feels cramped at the maximum resolution of 800×600. As a sidenote, the thing comes with a Zip drive, to swap with the CD-ROM. Remember those? I celebrate thy death, oh removable magnetic storage.

Dell Latitude Cpt

A $5 win at the same garage sale the Thinkpad came from, it came with a 433mHz processor, no RAM and no hard drive. It’s currently borrowing a 32MB stick from the Gateway (which proved that it turns on), and isn’t giving much to help anyone (how dare Ubuntu GTK 1.2 Remix throw a kernel panic due to insufficient memory!). I’ll probably buy a 128-256MB stick of RAM off eBay, along with a 20GB hard drive, and then put either CrunchBang or Arch on it, depending on my mood. If it runs fast enough, I’ll either use it as a backup (behold! The screen works perfectly!), or loan it to someone. The whole print/file server idea crossed my mind, but if that gets implemented it’ll probably be with one of the computers with a Cat5 port and broken screen.

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