MenZa’s Weblog

Yup, that’s right. No, I haven’t gotten another brother or sister (thank God!) — but a notebook computer!

It’s not a new machine; it’s very low-end, but it’s quite nice for school use, low-end gaming (Worms World Party, Solitaire, Knights anD Merchants, Half-Life) and the like.

It’s an old Dell C600, with the following specs:

• Pentium III 850 MHz
• 512mb memory
• ATi Mobility 128 (2x AGP!)
• 10 gig HD (which I’ll swap for a new one as soon as I can afford one)

Unfortunately, it doesn’t come with neither WLAN nor Ethernet, but the docking station that came with it has eth, so I’m forced to have it plugged in at all times when I need it.

The Operating System

Believe it or not, I chose to install Microsoft Windows. Why? Because the laptop’s so old, no modern Linux distributions support it. I was unable to even install Ubuntu Dapper. I don’t know why.
Another reason I was forced to do so, is the lack of harddrive. I mean, ten gigs?! It’s nothing. I’ve already filled 60% of it, which leaves me with 4 gigs of space. Of course, I’ve installed all the neccesities: Photoshop, MSN Messenger, mIRC, foobar2000, OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird, UltraEdit (<3), a few games and some of my mp3 collection (hey, I can't work without my music!).

And hey, for a price of £150 (where my parents pay £50), I got:

• Dell C600
• Docking station with ethernet etc.
• Original Dell bag
• Spare diskette drive (it goes right in the archival drawer; no need for it)
• 2 AC adapters

I’m very satisfied, and I can’t wait to see the full potentials of this box.