tardis Mk IV has arrived......
A 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.