A Bit Over the Top

I'm a little bit embarrassed, but I have to tell you...  I'm writing this on yet another laptop...  And this one is a total departure for me...

People are going to start to think that I'm off the deep end, and am able to throw money away like a crazy person...  Not true.  I do get a little crazy at times, but I try to only pick up stuff if the deal is good.  This one was, even if it was a little on the odd side.

I managed to grab a Dell XPS M1530.  Now, I'm normally not the biggest fan of Dells, and I'm well aware of the GPU problems the XPS series has had.  But this is one of the few Dells that I actually like (the other being the XPS M2010, which I do not own, but would love to have), and things seem to be OK on the GPU front.  (And I'm not one to push the graphics system anyway...)  The price was far lower than I thought I could ever get one for, so...

I'm still an idiot, but hey...

So, anyway, this is a nice little system, Core2Duo, running at 2.4 Ghz.  4 GB of RAM, 500 GB HD.  Right now, it has Win7 on it, but I'm not really sure how long that will last.  (At the moment, I'm running PhatSlacko 5.5 off of a thumb drive.)  The previous owner installed a new battery, but it's a 6 cell instead of the 9 cell I prefer.  (I'm just doing battery tests now.)

I had planned, after picking this system up, to install Simplicity Linux on it.  Right after I got the thing set up, I did a live boot into SL 13.4 from CD.  However, all didn't go smooth.  For some reason, there were problems with the wireless.  (It had worked fine in Windows.)  I fought with it for a while, then decided to do a quick experiment.  I jumped over to my older PNY install of Phat, booted up, and was online in a snap.  Everything configured fine...

Sooo...  I'm now thinking strongly about Lighthouse64 for this system.  I have the latest beta .ISO sitting on my desktop, but just haven't burnt to CD yet.  However, I'm also going to run a test on FatDog64 621, as I do have that on CD  We shall see how things go.

Slacko is running fine, though.  I'll probably run through all my thumb drive collection, just to see how each looks.  I haven't really had this long enough to say yay/nay, but I like it so far.

Yet another "we shall see."  I'm hoping for good things...

Now, off to more playing...