Thursday 10 January 2008

Pic of the day: The ugliest laptop I've seen in many years. And it is mine, all mine!

The ugliest laptop

I just bought the ugliest laptop I've seen since the 80es. You know, when laptops were described as "as heavy as a secretary, and hotter". This one is not nearly as heavy, but about as broad. The color is gray plastic with a keyboard in white plastic, or at least a whiter shade of pale. It has a full numeric keyboard with they + key where you expect the enter key to be. Likewise the Fn key is where the left Ctrl key should be, and vice versa.

The good thing is that it sold for 77% of the price of comparable machines, included another LG machine with similar specs but smaller and smexier. With 2GB it runs Vista without a second thought, although it still habitually spins the hard disk. I am told Vista does this more or less on principle, but it's just 1-2 small ticks a second, as if to make sure the hard disk is there. It also spins the disk for quite a while sometimes when it waits for me to log on, but again this is probably a feature of Vista rather than of LG.

The good thing, and the reason I bought it, is that it works wonderfully with my wireless broadband. It connects to the Internet through a small modem that is fastened to the top of the monitor and plugs into the USB port. Actually into two USB ports, in order to draw that much more power. I tried that with the old HP laptop - not the oldest but the laptop I had at work before this - and it barely got connected at all, and downloaded more slowly than a dial-up modem. No "broadband" there. But now there is. It is not like the DSL, but good enough to listen to music from the Internet, including YouTube music videos. (I tend to run those in a background window because the movies are distracting, but the music much less so.)

The old machine was anyway so slow that I rarely ran it in Windows mode. I had installed Ubuntu Linux on it, and it worked at an acceptable speed there, but I never got the wireless modem to work, despite trying different how-tos that I found on the Net. Generally they were all written by Linux geeks, and I am too old for that level of geekery now. As Linux grows more user-friendly, it will probably support these devices with no fiddling eventually, but it could still be a couple years.

With computers now being ridiculously cheap by historical standards, even running the bloated, inefficient Windows Vista is no problem for a budget machine. Which this definitely is. And it is a budget machine because it is ugly, amazingly so. I can only assume that they thought it would look good to some group of people, and when it didn't, they had to dump the price. There is really nothing wrong with it except it being big and ugly. Then again so am I.

It is an LG E500, but I gave it the network name NOZEXPLZ. Like my own, the name is currently unique in the world.