New laptop!!!
So, I bit the bullet and purchased a new laptop. For a couple of weeks I’ve been agonizing over whether I should go for the sweet, albeit expensive, PowerBook G4 17″ or the cheaper, yet similarly stocked, Dell Inspiron 9300. They both have 17″ screens, but the Mac seemed to have a slightly better quality display. They both had similar-performing hard drives and DVD+/-RW drives. Firewire, USB, etc. The Powerbook had 512MB of RAM and the Dell had 1GB.
The Powerbook had a price tag of $2499 and the Dell was about $1699. Then I found a great deal on GotApex for the Dell (great place to check if you’re looking for a bargain) and the pricetag after shipping and tax was $1200. I couldn’t argue with that, so I bought the Dell.
So I’ve been waiting all week with baited breath and Mr. Brown finally pulled up this morning with a box from Dell in his hand. I almost kissed him on the lips, but resisted the urge. I’m a manly knitter afterall.
With all of the will-power I could muster to not rip the box shreds, I gingerly opened the box and found a couple of CDs, a power chord and the machine inside. I pulled it out of the box with care and found the above-average ~8 lb of laptop quite light in my hands. It was as if the insides were filled with sunshine dust…
So now that I’m done thinking nasty thoughts about a piece of metal full of toxic materials and sunshine dust, it’s time to get down to business. I took care to uninstall all of the crap that came pre-installed. I chose not to reformat and reinstall this time because it didn’t actually come with a WinXP installation CD. I’m assuming the 6GB partition at the beginning of the drive is holding a restore image in case I do something stupid like format c:.
Now comes the task of repartitioning, installing linux for dual-boot (probably Ubuntu) and pulling my hair out for a couple of days. I’m glad I got some sleep this week.
I’ll update the blog with information about the progress of the dual-boot installation…