i didn't post on my birthday! isn't that a capital offense?! the blog police will get me! i'll be locked in windowless room and forced research blogrolls selected at random for the rest of my life! i'll never see
yeah, i got bored just writing that.
i was twenty-three yesterday. (and i'm still twenty-three today, even!) i'm losing "recent college graduate" status and migrating into the great unknown. is it inappropriate to feel old at twenty-three? no matter: onward, to adulthood and doom!
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you may have noticed my lack of verbosity over the past two weeks. meet rohan.before you ask: no, i did not intentionally copycat my brothers' lord of the rings naming scheme. i was flipping through my short collection of emily dickinson poems when howard shore's rohan theme soared in, and that was that.
i wish my camera had been operational when it arrived (i only just purchased new batteries for it), so i could have documented the entire procedure. it's got the weirdest ac adapter i've ever seen--forgot to take a picture, so visit the product page until i get one up. it doesn't look weird in their photo, but the plug that attaches the laptop cord to the power brick is just odd, and the plug itself forces the laptop cord to lay flat across the brick going the wrong direction. so stretching the cord to its full length actually stresses the plug. absolutely rotten design for a seven-pound laptop.
apologies, i started off on a negative!
(incidentally, it's currently 77 degrees [fahrenheit] outside.)
i love this laptop. i was skeptical at first, because it came with all the dell bundling and nonsense. took an hour or so to get that off and replace xp media center with xp professional. (my dual-boots always put linux last. saves a step.) had a minor panic once it was installed, though. see, my xp disk is pre-service-pack-1. old. complete with old drivers. so it didn't recognize the wireless card, video card, modem, sound card, touchpad, or (and this is the most important one) ethernet card (broadcom bcm4401 10/100). so thunk i, nevermind, my service pack 2 disk must have those. popped that one in, did the upgrade: still no drivers. i ended up getting the ethernet drivers off broadcom's website on the other laptop (hoping they were the right ones, because windows wasn't sure and i didn't think to check dell's [excellent] support website), burning them to a cd (no floppy drives here, baby), and shuttling them over to rohan. it was exciting, really.so that's when i started loving this laptop. it's so fast. and the screen is so big. and it's got so much space. but why pontificate i thus? see for yourself:
Dell Inspiron 6000
- Processor: Intel Pentium M 760 (Dothan): 2GHz, 2MB L2 Cache, 533MHz FSB
- Display: Samsung 15.4" WSXGA+ LCD (native resolution: 1680x1050)
- Memory: 512MB Shared (?) DDR2, 533MHz, 1 Dimm
- Hard disk: Western Digital 80G SATA, 5400rpm
- Video: ATI Mobility Radeon X300, 128MB dedicated
- Optical: TSST DVD+/-RW TS-L532B, 8x
- Wireless: Intel PRO/Wireless 2200 internal, 802.11b/g @ 54Mbps
- Battery: 53 WHr 6-cell lithium-ion