Friday 14 July 2006

Pic of the day: One of my two laptops is visible to the left, on top of the black monster machine. Actually that's the newer of the two.

Too old laptop?

As I installed Google Desktop 4 Beta on my old laptop, it did not work. A lot of error messages came up about web clips not working. This was not a total shock: The laptop in question has 248 MB RAM. I thought they only came in binary numbers: 16. 32, 64, 128, 512, 1024. But evidently something (presumably the video card) is using 8 of those MB.

I don't know if I told you the final end of the Toshiba. Unable to make the power supply work any longer, because the contact was loose, I took it to the shop. They were pretty clear on the fact that they could not repair it, and it would be prohibitively expensive anyway. This does not really surprise me, but it was the last machine where I could play Daggerfall and Master of Magic. Still, throwing away the price of a new PC to have it repaired did not make enough sense, especially since I already had two other portables. So I sent the Toshiba (and its power supply) to recycling. It did have personal stuff on it that I could not delete because I did not have power, but I suppose if anyone really wants it they can have it. It's not like I have my credit card number on it or anything. Besides, my cards from back then have expired.

So this is not the 32 MB Windows 98 machine, this is the 248 MB Windows XP machine. 248 MB should be enough for anyone, right? Also it is a Hewlett Packard, a paragon of reliability. But now it was struggling. Of course, I have loaded up a lot of software and peripherals on it over the time, which probably does not help the stability. It wasn't exactly racing around, even before I installed this cutting-edge background process.

***

I thought this would be a good time to start looking for the next laptop. After all, I now only have two of them, and the other was converted to Ubuntu Linux, there to be used as a file sharing server. It is not something that needs awesome processing power, since the DSL bandwidth limits the activity in any case. It does not even need to have that much hard disk space, since I can use any disk on the Network for that. (The internal network is much faster than the DSL.) The benefit of Linux is that worms and viruses don't work since they are written for Windows.

I took a trip to the city center and looked at new laptops. Soon I found one that was perfect: A Hewlett Packard, my favorite brand. Only $1000 or so (including the Scandinavian 25% sales tax) for a machine with 1GB RAM. Admittedly it wasn't one of those new super-slim, lightweight laptops. It is roughly the same weight as the old one, and slightly less than the Ubuntu machine, which has a built-in ATI graphics card. (I thought I could play games on it, but that was a bit optimistic.) Without the extra graphics card it should also pull less power and make less heat, thus running the fan less.

Well, it was perfect, except for one thing: I did not really need it. Nice to have, but I have still not paid off all the short-term (and thus expensive) debt I took up when I moved at the start of February. Payment proceeds according to plan, and luckily the landlord says that I can stay here even though he will have to pay taxes for renting it out now. I just have to pay 11% more. Can't complain about that. So, I am not in a pinch or anything. I have enough to do whatever I want (because I don't want much, admittedly). I could buy the computer if I really wanted to. But it would not be wise. I had the distinct impression that the angels would not break out in happy cheering.

Since I now have the monster machine, I don't actually use the Ubuntu laptop for file sharing anymore. It did not support Azureus, a program that greatly automates sharing of multiple files depending on need. So I have moved file sharing to the monster machine (but saving the less used files on the Sims2 machine, which has a larger but slower disk). Had to invest in Norton worm protection, but it is better than running yet another machine in there in the summer heat. So theoretically, the Ubuntu machine could be formatted back to Windows XP again. I have the original disks at work.

But not even this was necessary. I downloaded Intern Exploder 7 Beta to the old machine, set it as standard browser instead of Opera (which is poorly supported by Google, but which I still use for actual surfing), uninstalled Google Desktop, restarted the machine and installed Google Desktop again. This time it worked flawlessly, and there was rarely any slowdown of the machine. As expected from Google!

So, it was a happy ending after all.