New laptop

I indulged and bought myself a new laptop this week. There were some good end-of-financial year sales and this coincided with the mysterious random crash of my desktop PC.

The laptop is a Dell Inspiron 640. It has a 60GB hard drive, DVD RW, 1024MB RAM, Intel 1.66 processor and all the bells and whistles for networking.

Windows XP was pre-installed and this weekend I’ve successfully added Kanotix. I’m in the process of installing Puppy megapup with KDE and Grafpup multimedia.

First impressions are good. The screen is more horizontal than I expected. Everything works and I took the opportunity of a new XP install to try Internet Explorer beta with tabbed browsing. It’s pretty neat and I’ll stick with that on the rare occasions I use Windows.

I had some problems with upgrading the Kanotix installation, so decided to only update individual programs when required. Audio wasn’t working at first, but I’ve got it going now after reading some tips in the Kanotix forum.

I bought a Logitech V200 cordless mouse. It’s tiny and connects via a USB dongle. It worked intuitively with Windows, Kanotix and Puppy and I’m quite happy with it.

The biggest drama was getting it out of the packaging. I needed bolt cutters to cut open the hard plastic, no exaggeration.

I’ll use the laptop at home and possibly at work. The kids have taken over the outside games room so I have to use the computer in our bedroom. The laptop takes up a lot less space and doesn’t make it seem the bedroom has been converted to an office.

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