- One thing I haven’t figured out yet with my new Dell 490 system running Windows Server 2008 is how to burn a CD. I have a LITE-ON DVD RW in it–the same drive that was in my old Windows XP system–but for some reason Windows Server reports it as a DVD-ROM. This one has me stumped, but I don’t have the time to really track it down. Although I am getting tired of going to some other machine for burning CDs.
- Several years ago I bought a Shuttle SK41G computer that served me quite well, first as a Linux test machine, then as a development platform, and finally as a small DNS server. About a year ago it lost its mind. I thought the problem was the battery for the CMOS RAM, but after replacing the battery the machine still loses the time whenever I shut it off. I hate to throw out a perfectly good (if somewhat aging) computer, but have a hard time justifying the time I’d spend puzzling this out.
- I’ve been considering buying a clone of my Dell Latitude D610 laptop. Dell doesn’t sell that machine anymore, but they’re plentiful on eBay: at about $400 for a fully loaded machine, shipping included. That’s about 20% of the new price from three years ago. It’s a very serviceable machine, with a 2 GHz processor, 2 GB of RAM, hard drives from 30 to 160 GB, and a nice display that’ll do 1400×1050 pixels. The only possible drawback is that it’s a single core 32-bit processor.
- Dual core laptops are pretty resonable. You can pick up a new Dell Inspiron 1525 on eBay for $500 or $600. For $700, you can get one fully loaded with lots of RAM and a big hard drive. I wonder about battery life, though. Can I get five hours out of it with the optional battery in the expansion bay? And honestly: do I really need multiple cores in a laptop?
Sorry, I don’t know anything about the DVD drive or time reset problems… Just thought I’d leave a little note though!
It’s amazing what kind of computer you can get for a few hundred dollars; and a laptop at that! But yes I do believe dual core is worth it, laptop or desktop. My laptop with a Core 2 Duo 2ghz runs SO much smoother and locks up so much less often than my work computer, a Pentium 4 at 3ghz. I mean, of course part of it is that 2×2ghz is 4ghz, which is > 3ghz (yes I know it does not map linearly like that) and also that the Core 2 Duo is much more efficient than the Pentium line, but still. (And no my work computer does not have spyware or anything; although, come to think of it, it is running McAfee AV so that doesn’t really help the cause…) Sometimes I just wish I could use my laptop at work, because my job would be quite a bit less frustrating if Outlook didn’t take ages to open up, or Visual Studio didn’t take several minutes to compile my tiny apps…
But as far as five hours of battery life, I would say there’s a good chance with that extra expansion bay battery. Without the extra battery, the computer probably gets close to 4. My Inspiron E1705 (a 17″ monster with a NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900GS video card) gets almost 3 hours of battery life max (that’s if I’m in power saver mode with the screen a couple notches down in brightness and not doing anything to max out the processors), so I would definitely believe a 15″ gets better than that, and then the extra battery should be a clear boost and it will probably push you over the 5 hour mark depending on what you’re doing.
Keep up the good blog! :)