Wednesday, 24 March 2010

A short record of my interests, hobbies, obsessions and things I think about.

I go through phases of looking at stuff on the internet. For the past few days, I have searched for computers. My girlfriend's laptop started to behave erratically, and I took to the internet to find a reliable, sturdy machine with which to replace it.

It has since behaved itself now that it knows it can be replaced.

To start my blog of what I suspect will contain many computer related things I will sum up my (and my girlfriends) current machines.

Desktop

An old Fujitsu-Siemens workstation, currently listed as one of my Dad's "assets" at BT. An old machine, but top of the range when it was new:
  • 2.4 GHz Pentium 4
  • 1.5 GB of RAM
  • And a new 120GB hard drive I just got today for £15 :)
I had some difficulty hunting down an AGP2 graphics card for this, eventually paying out £15 for something only twice as fast as the puny on-board processor!
Laptop
A Medion MD2837. Medion are an obscure brand, sold through outlets including ALDI and Toys 'R' Us. Like the desktop, a high spec machine for its age (~10 years)
  • 2GHz Pentium 4
  • 1GB RAM
  • 80GB HDD
Tablet
I recently acquired a HP TC1100 from a friend, and breathed some more life into it with extra RAM and a new Wi-Fi card.
  • 1GHz Pentium M
  • 1GB RAM
  • 40GB HDD
The tablet is pretty good for lectures, I must have saved about a kilo of paper using it.


All of these machines now run Ubuntu. I have found it to be much more flexible and reliable than windows, and almost any software you want can be obtained for free. Later I intend to branch out into the Linux family, to see what other distributions can offer me... This may be the topic of my next post!