tardis Mk IV has arrived......
Nov. 5th, 2011 12:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poltr1A new laptop -- or a refurbished one -- has been on my wish list for over a year. I ordered one for myself last year around Christmas time, but I sent it back, unopened, as I realized I couldn't afford to keep it. So the only thing I was out was the return shipping costs. Oh well.
A couple weeks ago, I was able to make a good-sized payment on my credit card. I had been looking at a Dell Latitude D620 refurbished laptop on overstock.com. (This one.) I placed my order, and within a week, it was in my hands. I also bought the matching docking station. Now I need to get a second power supply for it, and I'm all set!
A closer look at the machine showed that it was actually a D630. They must have run out of the D620s. So I got a free upgrade. Bonus!
The specs: 2.00 Ghz Intel Core 2 dual processor. 80 Gb hard drive. 4 Gb memory. (Yeah, that should be adequate. :-) ) Windows XP (not Vista or 7) pre-installed. Built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. 4 USB 2.0 ports. This should last me for a few years. I may get a larger hard drive down the line, though. Myabe a 160 GB or a 250 GB. But first I need to pull it out to see if it's EIDE/PATA or SATA.
So I fired it up, did the necessary Windows initialization and setup, and plaayed around with it a bit. The Wi-Fi was disabled, both by the switch on the left-hand side of the laptop, and in the BIOS. I tweaked both and had Wi-Fi. The hard drive showed a capacity of 65 Gb. Poking around with the Management Console (aka Admin Tools / Disk Manager) showed an unmounted system partition of 8 Gb. That's probably my system recovery "disk", since I didn't get a CD-ROM with the machine. It also came with a 60-day trial of Office 2007, but without the software key.
In the next week or two, I will be downloading and installing my must-have apps for Windows boxes: Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, Cygwin, FileZilla, Pidgin, PuTTY, and the rest of the apps contained in the PortableApps suite (I can't think of them at the moment). Maybe I'll install Google Chrome to play around with it. I might even install Ubuntu Linux on it, in a dual-boot configuration. (Why? Because I can! And I've come to like Ubuntu better than Windows. So long as I'm using Gnome and not Unity for the UI. Yecch.)
I'll still keep the old laptop -- tardis Mk III, a Dell Latitude CPx -- for traveling. But I'll be migrating data and apps from it soon. I also have several drive modules that I'm keeping with it.
Why do I prefer refurbished laptops and not new ones? I think they're cheaper than new ones. And I don't need to have the latest and greatest technologies to get what I want done. 802.11n? Don't need it yet. DVD burning? Don't really need it on a laptop, but it I have it, that's cool. And If it's refurbished the right way -- cleaned up cosmetically and physically, checked, re-tuned, and the hard drive was wiped and re-imaged with an operating system -- it runs like a like-new system. All of the laptops I ever owned have been used or refurbished.
And why Dell? This is the third Dell Latitude laptop I owned. They're easy to maintain, take apart, and put together again. And they geet the job done.
A couple weeks ago, I was able to make a good-sized payment on my credit card. I had been looking at a Dell Latitude D620 refurbished laptop on overstock.com. (This one.) I placed my order, and within a week, it was in my hands. I also bought the matching docking station. Now I need to get a second power supply for it, and I'm all set!
A closer look at the machine showed that it was actually a D630. They must have run out of the D620s. So I got a free upgrade. Bonus!
The specs: 2.00 Ghz Intel Core 2 dual processor. 80 Gb hard drive. 4 Gb memory. (Yeah, that should be adequate. :-) ) Windows XP (not Vista or 7) pre-installed. Built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. 4 USB 2.0 ports. This should last me for a few years. I may get a larger hard drive down the line, though. Myabe a 160 GB or a 250 GB. But first I need to pull it out to see if it's EIDE/PATA or SATA.
So I fired it up, did the necessary Windows initialization and setup, and plaayed around with it a bit. The Wi-Fi was disabled, both by the switch on the left-hand side of the laptop, and in the BIOS. I tweaked both and had Wi-Fi. The hard drive showed a capacity of 65 Gb. Poking around with the Management Console (aka Admin Tools / Disk Manager) showed an unmounted system partition of 8 Gb. That's probably my system recovery "disk", since I didn't get a CD-ROM with the machine. It also came with a 60-day trial of Office 2007, but without the software key.
In the next week or two, I will be downloading and installing my must-have apps for Windows boxes: Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, Cygwin, FileZilla, Pidgin, PuTTY, and the rest of the apps contained in the PortableApps suite (I can't think of them at the moment). Maybe I'll install Google Chrome to play around with it. I might even install Ubuntu Linux on it, in a dual-boot configuration. (Why? Because I can! And I've come to like Ubuntu better than Windows. So long as I'm using Gnome and not Unity for the UI. Yecch.)
I'll still keep the old laptop -- tardis Mk III, a Dell Latitude CPx -- for traveling. But I'll be migrating data and apps from it soon. I also have several drive modules that I'm keeping with it.
Why do I prefer refurbished laptops and not new ones? I think they're cheaper than new ones. And I don't need to have the latest and greatest technologies to get what I want done. 802.11n? Don't need it yet. DVD burning? Don't really need it on a laptop, but it I have it, that's cool. And If it's refurbished the right way -- cleaned up cosmetically and physically, checked, re-tuned, and the hard drive was wiped and re-imaged with an operating system -- it runs like a like-new system. All of the laptops I ever owned have been used or refurbished.
And why Dell? This is the third Dell Latitude laptop I owned. They're easy to maintain, take apart, and put together again. And they geet the job done.
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no subject
Date: 2011-11-05 08:26 pm (UTC)Several things I've learned might help:
(1) Dell's online support site ( http://support.dell.com ) is quite good as far as manuals and drivers. You will have to navigate to your machine's type, but usually that site will have the stuff you want and need.
(2) If the maximum RAM for that model is greater than 4GB, newegg.com has had a LOT of inexpensive ($40 or less for 8GB) laptop RAM lately. If you watch http://www.hot-deals.org/ you will know when and if it happens again.
(3) I believe that model is likely to use a SATA hard drive. However, hard drives either are or are about to become more expensive for a while, due to the flooding in Thailand (which produces a large fraction of hard drives) and Chinese prices on rare earths being raised. So either buy soon or prepare to wait six or twelve months.
Enjoy!