New Laptop

Getting a new laptop for me has been pretty regular:

Mid-1998: CTX – screen hinges broke by late 2000
Early 2001: Dell – repeated keyboard problems (poor support)
Late 2002: Compaq – just plain died in late 2004
Late 2004: HP – still works!

The CTX was the first ‘real’ laptop I had and was able to take with me to work. Thus, this is the first time I’ve bought a laptop while the previous one still worked. I had an *old* Toshiba prior to the CTX but didn’t use it much and didn’t take it on trips with me (it was a 286, weighed 17 lbs. and ran DOS).

I wanted something smaller and lighter, but still with a big enough screen to use on a regular basis without really being tiny. The 15.4″ widescreens are way too big (and don’t fit in my bag anyway). The 14.1″ ones would *barely* fit and I might have gotten one of those, but there are a few laptops out there with 13.3″ screens.

As far as I can tell, it’s only Toshiba and Sony that make them and the Sonys are really expensive. I wound up with a Toshiba U305-S7448 – Core 2 duo 1.46 Ghz, 2 Gig memory, 160 Gig SATA HDD, and so on.

On my old laptop I was using Mandriva 2006 and was really needing to upgrade for a variety of reasons. I installed Mandriva 2008 and boy is it great! I did boot Vista a couple times and boy is it *not* great. On the bright side, the improvements in MDV2008 are so significant that it now appears very unlikely that I’ll ever boot into Windows again. There’s one thing I need to test (bidding at work) which I won’t be able to test for a couple weeks. Aside from that, it’s looking pretty good.

The MDV2008 install was also the best, easiest, most functional install out of the box I’ve ever had. The only ‘essential’ thing I had to work on to make work was the wifi adapter, which required a windows driver to be downloaded and a configuration file to be changed. Now it works perfect. Things I’m amazed worked right out of the box: the built-in webcam, the SD/MMC memory card adapter, and one of my printers (it autodetected both network printers and had the ppd file for one of them included in the distribution). What still doesn’t work? Some of the ‘extra’ keys. I had to change keyboards and that enabled some of them, but not all of them. I might work on that a bit more.

Anyway, the point of all that is, I have a new laptop! 😉 And Mandriva *finally* got a good (no, *great*) release out after a couple mediocre ones! 😉

V-