Okay,the final part, continuing from yesterday. One of the two laptops I have at home is an old laptop, an Acer Aspire 1400XC, bought in Funan IT Mall, Singapore, in 2002. It is Intel Pentium 4 CPU 1.7GHz, with 14.1" XGA TFT LCD (16MB VGA RAM of ATI Mobility M6 Card), 256MB Memory, 20GB HDD and DVD/CD-RW, running Windows XP Home Edition. The screenshot is on the left. Before you scowl at yet another plain looking desktop, let me tell you I have good reasons for it: the laptop is decaying. The battery is dead for many years (so I have to rely on external power). The DVD/CD-RW is damaged and non-functional. The sound speaker is kind of broken whenever I turn the volume up. There is a crack in the lid. Pathetic, really, but anyway this laptop has been with me since 2002 and still is functional, despite all the bad things that has happened to it. I have told in one of my posts in the past that I am not financially strong, so that is why I still keep even this disintegrating laptop. Hey, it still works anyway. Since the DVD/CD-RW is damaged, and I do not think a replacement is worth it, the installed OEM Windows XP Home Edition has not been re-installed since the day of the purchase. It gets more and more slow everyday due to the accumulated registry entries and such. I have a few registry cleaner software, but it still gets worse. Since it cannot boot from USB, I cannot employ any Linux LiveUSB to boot the device. Hence the desperate measures: get rid of effects, switch to classic theme, run registry cleaner software rigorously, get an antivirus that has low memory footprint, etc. Anyway, this device will stay with me until its last breath :-) With all those damages with this Acer laptop, it may seem funny that I still look forward to Acer Aspire One. Well, I have not yet decided to buy it anyway. I still have to save up if I am to buy it.
The second laptop is a laptop bought in 2006. It is Asus A6J Intel Centrino Duo T2300 1.66GHz
, 15.4"WXGA with 256MB VGA RAM of ATI Mobility X1600, 80GB HDD, and 512MB Memory, running Windows XP Home Edition too. This one actually belonged to one of my cousins. He gave the laptop to me early this year, probably because he was sorry to see the state of my Acer laptop :-) Anyway, with this laptop, I only boot to Windows to play videogames that are only playable under Windows. For other activities, I boot into Linux with Linux LiveUSB. Until several days ago, I actually use Slax Linux to boot this laptop. However, due to a certain... ahem, disagreement over the statement of the footer on the Slax author's website, I decided not to use the distro anymore. It certainly helps big time that many new Linux distros come out each week. If you are not satisfied with one distro, you can switch to another distro. No license fees, no payments necessary (other than the bill of internet access to download the distro). No forced update shoved down your throat, you get to decide when you want to update or upgrade. So I did switch to another, which is Nearly Office Pup (NOP) Dingo, a derivative of Puppy Dingo 4. Since I have just switched several days ago, I have not made much customizations yet, so the screenshot seen here is not much different than the default.
Okay, that concludes the 3-part posts to make this PalmAddicts site more personal. Until next time, Sammy and fellow PalmAddicts readers and writers :-)
