Yes, here is _another_ post! Didn't see that one coming did you?
Actually, the title refers to a laptop. A tragedy among tragedies befell 'ol lappy. Mayhaps I should say that 'ol lappy befell onto the ground? In any case, she works fine assuming you can use a computer well without a functioning monitor. The incident of which I speak occurred about a month ago, and I've been getting along fine despite the lack of lappy. For a while, I was going to buy a Mac laptop seeing as how they are the best value as far as new laptops are concerned. The problem I forsaw, was that I would get bored by the OS. MacOS X is a shiny testament to the hard work and innovation that goes on at Apple. However, as a hacking hobbyist, my entertainment is derived from tweaking the OS and having one that is already optimized and stable wouldn't leave me with much to do. Imagine my excitement when I stumbled accross an old Acer laptop in the storage area behind Triple "L." As it turned out, this not-so-old laptop was retired due to a heavily farked windows install, and bad battery, and a monitor whose colors would inexplicably shift to pink. It was owned my Mr. Marsh, the accountant who rents the office next to Triple "L"
He and I talked about it, and he threw out the figure of $50; which I could not pass up. I decided to take a look at it to make sure that it worked for the most part and threw in a copy of slax that I keep on my person. She booted right up without a hitch. As a matter of fact, I was taken aback by the pristine shape it was in. It's an 800Mhz Celeron (Coppermine Core) with 128MB of RAM and a 10GB harddrive. The screen is a decent 14" with no dead pixels. The battery life is sporadic, at best. I have yet to experience the "pink screen" that used to plague the machine, but I haven't had it for a week yet, so I'll give it some time. I tried to boot windows for shits and giggles. After about 5 minutes I decided to shut it off before I punched it. There were so many extra programs that were running that you couldn't effectively do _anything_.
Anyhoos, Les and I sealed the deal and I quickly went to work on it. There exist some very interesting facets behind this machine. For example, APM doesn't like the machine too much, so I'm learning how to utilize ACPI correctly. So far I'm impressed, the options are much more in depth than they were in APM, and I'm just beginning to scratch the surface. Despite being well over double the speed of the old lappy, I don't seem to notice it so much. Of course, lappy had a PII and this _is_ a neutered proccessor, so I should expect some differences. I was actually able to take the 128MB stick o' RAM out of 'ol lappy and put it in this machine, and that seems to help quite a bit. The touchpad driver is very interesting. It allows for "Circular Scrolling," which is quite similar to the iPod clickwheel. I make circles on the touchpad and it scrolls for me. Sexy, eh? Also, I can touch with 1, 2, or 3 fingers which are read as different mouse buttons. So while there are buttons on it, I don't have to move my hand at all, which I hope will more effective as I get used to it more.
The 'Ol Lappy still works, I think I'm going to set it up as a stereo machine and replace the main multimedia machine with it. The point behind that being the infared port on lappy will allow me to access music with nothing other than a standard TV remote control.
The new machine is considerably bulkier than the old laptop, but has the CD-ROM drive built right in, so that should be handy.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, I installed Slackware 10.1 on it. What else would I use?
-Dave
(I hope to post more soon, comment if you actually read this.)
