About My Toy
I bought it on eBay this past week for only $170 ($189.99 shipped)! It ended up costing about $35 more since I also had to buy a battery (the one it came with did nothing). At least I didn’t have to buy the battery from Dell – it’s about $135 from them. The laptop is about five years old, but in very good condition, and so far it runs great.
For those who may be interested in specs: it is a Dell Latitude C610 – 1GHz CPU, 512MB RAM, 20GB HDD 14.1" LCD. I think that covers the important specs. Basically, it’s ancient for a laptop – but it’s brand new to me, and the first laptop I’ve ever had!
I’m currently running Linux Mint as my Operating System for the laptop. I have to say that it is excellent. There was a little work to be done to get the wireless adapter (I have a USB one) and 3D accelleration working right, but it wasn’t too bad. I just had to do some creative Google searches to find the right information.
Benefits
There are some nice benefits to having a laptop:
- I can work on programming my DS game (Jack Turtle) from anywhere
- I can check stuff online very easily
- I can use the computer while Barbara is using ‘the computer’
- I can do all of the above from my easy chair!
For example, last night and this morning I have been working on getting my programming environment set up on the laptop (I’m using the Eclipse IDE). Then I started working on creating a site similar to this one for our sister-in-law.
While I was doing all these things, Barbara was updating this website with new posts in fun stuff (including videos!), and a new gallery in the snapshots! That would not have been possible last week!
Of course, I’m posting this from my laptop. :-)