There is a cabinet in my workplace which contains 5 Dell laptops. Now there will be a 6th and probably last Dell laptop going to that cabinet since my new laptop is not a Dell anymore. And this is not for lack of trying. And I’ve tried also Acer, Asus, Lenovo, even Toshiba. This was part of the now standard 3 year cycle of laptop renewal: make a list of requirements, search for a few weeks, get mad, search again, compromise, buy a laptop....
I have been delaying buying a new laptop for as much as I could but a decision have to be made sooner or later so I find myself being caught again in the laptop research process. The current one, a Dell Latitude D820 has served me well but I would greatly enjoy some improvement in the compilation times and overall speed. However looking at the available choices I am not in any way thrilled of joy and for the first time I am asking myself a new question: “should I buy a Mac?...
My first hi-res laptop was a Dell I8000 which had a, huge at the time, resolution of 1600×1200. It was quite expensive because of this but also a wonderful and productive experience. My next laptop was also a Dell, a I8600, which had a “wide-screen”. This means it had a 1680×1050 resolution. The switch was not so heavy even if I lost 150px in one shot. I moved the panels (as in gnome panels) to the right and gained some extra space....
So here are a few things which bother me a bit to this new toy: long shutdown time (even if the boot is very fast) large power cable (it’s absolutely huge compared to the laptop itself) long charging time Yet I am still happy with it, check the difference:
With great surprise I found out that my long awaited laptop arrived the next day after Christmas! Of course, for a few days I did not get much sleep and I played with my new toy. The alternatives It was a hard choice to find a replacement for the Inspiron 8000, which I used for 5 years with great joy. I was tempted by the new MacBook Pro, but adding the cost for 3 years of warranty, and all taxes in Romania, and Leopard needing a few more months of wait, I chose Dell Latitude D820 with an extra bonus: better screen resolution....
## Start Taking advantage of the the holiday spirit and the free time that comes with the package I could not resist the urge to update my 3 years gentoo linux system. It seems like an invisible bad force which pushes people to update things which work good such that they don’t work at all after. So, pushed by this force started a emerge -u world which I usually do twice a year....