I'm sitting here in bed after breakfast (egg and toast) contemplating my next dose of Vicodin. My jaw is killing me, and I mean that both literally and figuratively. Every time I move my mouth, I get shooting pains from my jaw up to my left ear. Thankfully, it is only the left side. I have been taking copious amounts of Vicodin to alleviate the pain. I feel like House.
Interesting fact, in case you weren't paying attention:
In the show, House lives at number 221, apartment B...
just like Sherlock Holmes.
Because of this, I have been limiting the amount of talking I have to do, especially at work. My friend Chris from work talks non-stop and I can't get a word in edgewise, which is good. Then my boss will call, and then I have to do all the talking to try to get out of whatever trouble I am in. But I digress...
Last night, mother and I went to Office Depot to get her some ink for her printer. While she was doing that, I looked over the new computers. I was shocked to see how much laptops have come down in price...and how big they have gotten. A laptop...with a 17" wide screen display? Puh-leeez! We are regressing to the days of the luggables...the Apple Mac Portable...the Osborne...the Compaq with the funny amber-text LCD... suitcases, if you will.
I have a laptop. My personal one, not the one from work. It is an old Dell Latitude X300. It is a tiny laptop that I bought from a company that refurbs old used and off-lease Dells. I love it because of its small size. 12" screen, only about 1/2" thick when closed. Ultra-portable at its finest. After I got it, I ordered some shell parts to replace some obviously worn areas around the track pad, and I shoved a 120 Gb hard disk into it and a gig of RAM, and made it my favorite machine to do everything. I've got both Windows XP Pro and Fedora Core 7 linux on it, so I can do just about anything I need to do.
The Dell Latitude X300 Ultra Portable.
Not a very flattering picture, though.
I usually keep it docked in the little "media bay" thing that it came with. The media bay has all the connectors out the back for network and printer and all that, but also holds an extra battery and the CD drive. That is the caveat with ultra-portables...they have to reduce size and weight, so it is usually the optical drive that suffers.
This laptop only cost me about $400. New they were quite a bit more. I have purchased many used laptops over the years. If I get a new one...well, a different used one..I generally sell the other on eBay. My friend McA, on the other hand, has about 50 laptops, so old that they all run Windows 95 that he uses for many of his projects at the research institute he works for. Well, I exaggerate...he really only has 5 or so, but still. The technologies he works on for the government are usually so out-dated that he has to have an old laptop to be able to work with them effectively.
I don't have a problem with buying old laptops, just as long as I get it from somewhere reputable. I don't have a problem with buying new, either, just I don't have that kind of money. And besides, as soon as you drive it off the lot it will become outdated. And I would rather have an older laptop since they are generally still usable, and won't end up in a landfill somewhere in China or India.
I have to wonder, how anyone with one of those huge 17" monstrosities of a laptop can use it effectively on a plane. Seats and tray tables are so cramped to begin with, how can they even get it out and open it? I have used my little lappie on a plane, and it worked great! Nice and small, the perfect size.
To each their own. I will be keeping my little lappie for a long time. Computers, as with cars, I eventually find one that is perfect for me. I've had IBM, Compaq, Apple, generic off-brand and Sony laptops in the past. Each have had their good points and bad points. Of all of them, I like this little Dell the best. It is too bad they don't make them any more. This one is what I would consider a reasonable laptop to have, not a huge monstrosity like what they make nowadays.
End rambling.
Interesting fact, in case you weren't paying attention:In the show, House lives at number 221, apartment B...
just like Sherlock Holmes.
Because of this, I have been limiting the amount of talking I have to do, especially at work. My friend Chris from work talks non-stop and I can't get a word in edgewise, which is good. Then my boss will call, and then I have to do all the talking to try to get out of whatever trouble I am in. But I digress...
Last night, mother and I went to Office Depot to get her some ink for her printer. While she was doing that, I looked over the new computers. I was shocked to see how much laptops have come down in price...and how big they have gotten. A laptop...with a 17" wide screen display? Puh-leeez! We are regressing to the days of the luggables...the Apple Mac Portable...the Osborne...the Compaq with the funny amber-text LCD... suitcases, if you will.
I have a laptop. My personal one, not the one from work. It is an old Dell Latitude X300. It is a tiny laptop that I bought from a company that refurbs old used and off-lease Dells. I love it because of its small size. 12" screen, only about 1/2" thick when closed. Ultra-portable at its finest. After I got it, I ordered some shell parts to replace some obviously worn areas around the track pad, and I shoved a 120 Gb hard disk into it and a gig of RAM, and made it my favorite machine to do everything. I've got both Windows XP Pro and Fedora Core 7 linux on it, so I can do just about anything I need to do.
The Dell Latitude X300 Ultra Portable.Not a very flattering picture, though.
I usually keep it docked in the little "media bay" thing that it came with. The media bay has all the connectors out the back for network and printer and all that, but also holds an extra battery and the CD drive. That is the caveat with ultra-portables...they have to reduce size and weight, so it is usually the optical drive that suffers.
This laptop only cost me about $400. New they were quite a bit more. I have purchased many used laptops over the years. If I get a new one...well, a different used one..I generally sell the other on eBay. My friend McA, on the other hand, has about 50 laptops, so old that they all run Windows 95 that he uses for many of his projects at the research institute he works for. Well, I exaggerate...he really only has 5 or so, but still. The technologies he works on for the government are usually so out-dated that he has to have an old laptop to be able to work with them effectively.
I don't have a problem with buying old laptops, just as long as I get it from somewhere reputable. I don't have a problem with buying new, either, just I don't have that kind of money. And besides, as soon as you drive it off the lot it will become outdated. And I would rather have an older laptop since they are generally still usable, and won't end up in a landfill somewhere in China or India.
I have to wonder, how anyone with one of those huge 17" monstrosities of a laptop can use it effectively on a plane. Seats and tray tables are so cramped to begin with, how can they even get it out and open it? I have used my little lappie on a plane, and it worked great! Nice and small, the perfect size.
To each their own. I will be keeping my little lappie for a long time. Computers, as with cars, I eventually find one that is perfect for me. I've had IBM, Compaq, Apple, generic off-brand and Sony laptops in the past. Each have had their good points and bad points. Of all of them, I like this little Dell the best. It is too bad they don't make them any more. This one is what I would consider a reasonable laptop to have, not a huge monstrosity like what they make nowadays.
End rambling.
2 comments:
One of my students has a laptop which is about 10 inches in size total and probably has an 8.5 inch screen. The text is so tiny that I don't see how she can use it without going blind. She brings it with her to lessons to play video for me from her subtitling work (which I help her with). It's about as portable as things get.
I think a 12" screen is optimal for a laptop, but I think they're likely to keep getting bigger. The focus will be on thinner but wider as time goes by. The main problem I have is that the fixed resolution means that all of th e screens are going to be huge with tiny text. It all seems pretty pointless.
I have a problem with the resolution as well. My 12" screen is a 1024x768, the perfect resolution for a screen this size. I can read the text quite easily and there is plenty of real estate to actually get work done.
I recently bought a laptop at work for a co-worker. I just priced it out and ordered it. The screen I got was a 15" UXGA+ widescreen, since it was included. When I got it and turned it on, the text was microscopic! The resolution on the screen was something like 1440x1024...patently ridiculous. The end user of the machine liked the amount of space they had for a desktop, but had to change the text size to be able to read anything at all!
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