Saturday, December 11, 2004

It followed me home

Honest, I just followed me home.

My Compaq laptop has been having problems charging its battery lately. I need a laptop when I do my side consulting work. So ... I picked up an Apple G4 iBook today at Microcenter, where they were running some good deals.

The iBook that followed me home has these features:
  • 12.1" screen
  • 256 megs of RAM, upgradeable to 1.25 GB
  • 1.2GHz G4 CPU
  • 30 GB HDD
  • DVD-ROM/CD-R drive
  • Airport Extreme 802.11g wireless NIC
  • 10/100 Ethernet
  • 56k modem
  • Mac OS 10.2.3 Panther
It's nice and light and the keyboard is pretty good. The layout is taking some getting used to, as is the UI. But it's extremely nice to have the killer Mac OS GUI but still be able to drop to a Bash prompt.

So far, I've installed several familiar apps: Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org 1.1.3, Gimp, and X11 (upon which OO.o and the Gimp rely). The Mac came with AppleWorks and a 30 day demo of MS Office for Mac which I'll probably delete, plus the various Apple iThings like iTunes, iPhoto, etc.

Since the Compaq is still useful as long as there's an AC outlet handy, it will be re-purposed as Judith's "upstairs PC." I just need to clean some stuff off it first. And Bagend will remain used as my desktop but I'm thinking of also making it my mail and file server. It has plenty of horsepower for the server job and can be kept secure, since it's running SuSE Linux.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Enjoy!
Peace / Shalom

Anonymous said...

Oh, ENVY unbearable. You have a Microcenter and my nearest one is in Atlanta. Sigh..

What pray tell, did you pay?

My wife just got a large notebook, for Christmas and her birthday. Add insurance and $200 in rebates due in, add a new laptop bag because of the 17" screen, a new mouse, taxes and XP Pro Upgrade and we are talking $2800, give or take a buck. CompUSA in Jacksonville. Effective price had been lowered.

Geoff
Whose soft cushy job is good for another 5 years, pending legislation and litigation.

Toshiba Satellite P35-S609 Notebook Pentium 4 3.2GHz HT Technology, 512MB, 80GB, DVDRW, 17" WXGA TFT, WLAN, Windows XP Home
- Specifications -

Part#: PSP30U-01Q001
CPU: Pentium4 3.2GHz
Display: 17"(1440x900) WXGA TFT
OS: WinXP Home Edition
Memory: 512MB (256MBx2) DDR333 SDRAM
Graphics: ATI RADEON 9000 IGP(128 MB shared )
HD: 80GB(4200rpm)
Optical Drive: DVD SuperMulti
Communication: 56K Modem, 10/100 LAN, Wireless LAN (802.11b/g)
Ports: 3 x USB 1.1, VGA, S-Video, IEEE-1394, Audio ports
Dimensions: 16.5" x 11.5" x 1.6"(W x D x H)
Weight: 10 lbs

Dave Markowitz said...

I paid $999 + PA's 6% sales tax.

I also could've gotten a printer along with it, which after I got a rebate back, would've been free. Since we have two inkjets and one laser I passed on that, however.