azazel-
Tender vittles  Posts: 5 Registered: 3/15/2002 Offline
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5/10/2002 at 14:32  |
I just ordered a Dell Inspiron 4100. 1Ghz PIII, 256 ram, 20 gig HD, DVD, ATI 16 meg video, WinXP Home. Just normal shit, nothing spectacular. I'm wondering a few things. First, how practical or feasible would it be for me to expect to be able to ditch my desktop system and go completely mobile? Anyone have experience with *nix or *bsd-based OS's on this series of systems? How difficult is it to set up a wireless lan? I know most of these questions I'll be able to answer once I finally get the damn thing, but I'm antsy, and I've never owned a laptop before. I'd like to get out of the upgrade rut that seems to plague my desktop existence, but I can't seem to break myself of the "hunger" I get when new shit comes out. One of the ways I can see doing this would be to ditch the desktop all together and go with solely a laptop (and my pda), but I don't want to regret it a few months down the road. Anyone ever been in a similar situation?
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vasudeva
Bad Taste in your Mouth   SSHOLEPosts: 4529 Registered: 3/8/2002 Offline
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5/10/2002 at 16:14 |
A few years ago -- four? five? -- I decided to buy a laptop.
I don't play around when I'm blowing large dollar amounts. I read reviews and reviews and reviews for about six months, until I determined the model I wanted to go with. It was the fastest machine in its class.
It cost $4400. I took out a loan. Made various UPS employees very angry, but eventually received it. I loved it. For the first few days, I kept everything in the packaging, even popping out the PCMCIA cards when I was done and wrapping them back up in their ruby-colored translucent wrappers. It's gay, I know.
That machine, which has had a variety of operating systems installed on it, now sits on an end-table in my living room area, and serves as a Debian 2.4 CVS server for work code, living-room access point, and general jumping-off point for SSH sessions and whatever else. (Thank god for the screen program.)
The terrible facts: it's a P166 MMX with 40MB RAM and 1 MB of video RAM.
And I spent over four grand on it. In fact, I once had a terrible girlfriend who broke the screen (a long story in its own right) and, like the dumbass I was, I paid another $1500 to replace the screen, when I should have simply forgotten about the LCD and run the damn thing headless over the network.
The moral, if there is one, is: don't spend four grand on a laptop. The other moral is: if your girlfriend is a crazy bitch, don't let her touch your fuking laptop, especially if you spent four grand on it.
The good news is that it's a Dell Latitude, and although the hardware is physically brittle, it's still a decent machine for being a dinosaur. In fact, it was my main home machine up until two years ago.
[Edited on 10/5/2002 by vasudeva]
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