Of aging, dead and comatose machines
It is almost one month my dear laptop (and, now that I am in this stupid inter-jobs period, main workstation) died. In fact, its passing away was one of the main reasons I decided to start blogging - I needed to tell someone of my grief and pain, of how much it hurts to lose such a faithful partner… But well, I didn’t do it. Silly me, had I spent around US$300 on time, I would have bought Dell’s extended warranty - And I have never seen a service with such a high quality as Dell’s! Well, my friend Alexander told me he can get it repaired for about US$300. Fair, I gave him my computer and am hoping for the best. Sadly, I will not be able to see my dear machine for a week, as I am going to 5to Encuentro Linux in Valparaíso, Chile… But I hope to have it back by next Tuesday, when I come back. Ok… One month without my main workstation. What have I done in the meantime? How am I able to survive? The first couple of days were really terrible. I took an old laptop a friend of mine gave me some time ago (a P133 with 48MB RAM). And… Well, let’s say it worked, although I could not do much with it. 240 bogomips are not quite thrilling. Then, some days later, p4ola offered to lend me a K6-2@450, 64MB RAM. That sounds like a usable machine… But it didn’t work as it should. I don’t remember the exact problems, but I could not get it to work comfortably. As I was going to CLEI in Arequipa, Perú, I asked my part-time employer (UPN) to lend me one of the laptops they have for professors going to trips - which, happily, they gave me. It is quite a decent machine - a Dell Latitude D400, comparable to mine, although a bit lighter (around 2Kg, against around 4), a bit slower (1.4 vs. 1.7GHz), has more RAM (512 vs. 256MB)… But there is one thing I cannot stand: The screen is 1024x768. I feel as if I were in a cage. I am used to 1400x1050. By the way, I should have handed this machine back about two weeks ago… Will do so next week :) I hope they are not too mad at me.
But this subject got me to think of my other machines: My main server. I love that machine, but… Well, until a couple of weeks ago, it was quite enough. It is my oldest laptop (Pentium 120, 32MB RAM), with a 40GB hard disk. It serves me as a DSL gateway, and as a SMB, mail and web server. If your web site is static, this machine is more than enough… But if you are reading this on my site (insteaed of one of the planets where I am syndicated), you will notice it takes ages to open. 20 seconds on average for the main blog page to display. Sucky. I just upgraded to 48MB RAM, but it hardly makes a difference. I don’t want to use any other machine for this, as a laptop makes a great home server - Almost no noise, very low power consumption, this old machine generates almost no heat so I can even store it in the bookshelf… Anyway, we will see what comes on next. …And speaking about old machines: I still have not had time to play with my gorgeous Mac Quadra 950, one of the best m68k systems ever made (66MHz, up to 256MB RAM - which I believe it has. In a previous life it was used as a video editing workstation). It would make quite a nice buildd ;-)
Comments
cctv 2005-01-06 17:24:40
RE: Of aging, dead and comatose machines
-Happy New Year -
leonel 2004-10-18 14:46:22
RE: Of aging, dead and comatose machines
hey ! Entiendo el dolor eso me paso con mi superduper IBM T23 al termino de la garantia se quemo el board.
Reparacion US$400.00 tiempo 6 meses pero por aqui ya esta up and runnin !
esperemos que si la reparen pronto porque un Gunnar sin Lap Es como debian sin APT jejeje