New Laptop On It's Way, Sooner Than Planned

A couple of months ago, I stated my laptop upgrade policy, which pretty much had me in a holding pattern until acted upon by a change in either the technology marketplace or in my situation.

Well, a slight nudge in both has resulted in me ordering a new primary laptop from Dell today. It's a thin, light 13" notebook from Dell's XPS lineup with the white shell (though mostly because I don't want red and have never really liked black laptops). With my changed specs, it came in just over $2000, which is more than I wanted to spend, but I won't do it again for 2 years, so I'm willing to rationalize it.

So, what changed to prompt this purchase?

First, the keyboard on the laptop I've been using has been causing problems. Multiple keys aren't working consistently. In fact, you may have noticed that words with "d", "y", "n" and "u" have been increasingly spelled wrong over the last couple of weeks. Plus, I picked up a bit more work in June than I expected and can afford to be in the market.

Then, I noticed that Dell, HP and the MacBook Pro's crossed a critical line recently, making 4GB the maximum RAM instead of the 2GB we've been stuck with for something like 3 years now. While actually *putting* 4GB in today isn't cheap enough for me to bother with, in 6 months, a year or 18 months, I can drop the couple of hundred bucks it will cost to bump the RAM. That was the prime factor I'd been waiting for before buying again.

More maximum RAM and relatively fast hard drives being available lifted the tech barriers, a bit of extra pre-tax cash lifted the financial barriers and having to re-type half of the words in everything I write lifted the psychological ones.

So, dug around for the options that would meet my needs and ended up at the 13" XPS options from Dell. I upgraded the RAM to 2GB (the other 2GB would have added $850: definitely across the peak), the hard drives to 160GB 7200RPM drives (though was intrigued by the 32GB solid-state option), the maximum battery, a docking station, bluetooth built-in, real video card, Wireless-N card, etc. to enable this thing to be a nice, powerful 4 pound package. My intent is to dual boot (or more) with Ubuntu as primary and Vista as a secondary OS. I could virtualize, but want native 3D graphics capability in both Vista and Ubuntu.

As for the existing laptop, I'll probably put it up for auction (with something like a $50 starting bid) in case anyone here would be interested in picking up a Linux laptop on the cheap. Someone who's willing to either disassemble and clean the keyboard or replace it would have a very nice little laptop with long battery life. I still regularly get 4-5 hours out of a charge.

Running Linux, it's rock stable, with upwards of 30 days uptime since last reboot. I just put it into hibernation mode and re-animate later. It's a/got:

• Dell 700m
• 1.6Ghz Pentium M processor
• 1.25GB RAM. There's 256MB under the keyboard that could be swapped out to make it 2GB.
• 60GB hard drive
• DVD-ROM/CDRW drive
• 9 cell battery
• 12" widescreen (one of the first with the glossy laptop screens instead of matte)
• The nearly worthless distinction of being the machine I did much of the writing for this site and nearly every bit of digital "stuff" I did for the last 3 years or so.

I'll reset the Ubuntu setup to new, so it will be ready to go when it arrives. Whatever I get for it will probably go to pick up a Mac mini to put on the KVM switch in my office. That'd give me a Mac again for the only real purpose I have for one: to play with it.

At any rate, I'll add a note on this post when the old Dell's actually up for bid somewhere.