New Laptop

The title of this post is actually rather misleading, as one might assume that it refers to the first new laptop I have acquired since my last post to this blog. That, however, is not the case. I have actually acquired several laptops, of varying age and performance, since my last post, but I shall save the complete list for a future post. This post shall be dedicated to my latest acquisition, a Dell Latitude D610.  Many of my readers may immediately recognise this as a model that is seemingly ubiquitous in schools and corporate workplaces, and indeed it is to an extent. For example, approximately 20 feet behind me and to the left is a similar laptop, owned by the school. Most of this school’s laptop fleet is made up of this model of laptop, and both of the schools I attended before Compass had similar fleets. Now, for a moment, I’d like to focus on the reason for this model (or, more accurately, series’) apparent ubiquity; its IT-friendliness. The entire Latitude D series is made up of laptops that have many interchangeable components, are easy and fast to disassemble and reassemble, and have relatively inexpensive replacement parts. These factors are, of course, just as attractive to me as they are to IT departments, albeit not necessarily for the same reasons. I enjoy the flexibility of upgrading offered by these laptops, the potential for modding, and the robust stock feature set, as well as the comfortable form factor and wide range of peripherals available. IT departments enjoy the speed with which they can return laptops, working, to their fellow (non-IT) employees, the ease with which they can return a laptop with a failed part to the field, often by simply swapping the part out of another laptop. They also appreciate the fact that they can simply move a “dead” laptop’s hard drive into a “live” laptop to keep all of its data without having to reinstall drivers or reconfigure any part of the operating system (in the case of windows, at least).

Now that I’ve covered some of the advantages of this laptop series, I’ll proceed to my specific laptop. First, the specifications:

• 2.00 GHz Pentium M (Pentium 4 Based)
• 2 GB RAM (Upgraded from 1 GB)
• 80 GB HDD (Upgraded from 40 GB)
• 14″ 1024×768 LCD
• Intel 915 GM Express graphics
• Broadcom BCM4306 a/b/g WiFi
• Dell Bluetooth adapter
• DVD-R/RW Module
• CD-R/RW/DVD Module
• Floppy Module
• Dell Latitude D/Dock
• ~2 hour battery

I swapped it for an iBook G3 14″/900 MHz with 576 MB of RAM, so I believe it was an excellent trade. The only real downside is that I don’t actually have a power cord for it, so I have to charge it on the docking station. To tell the truth, however, the docking station itself is enough of an upside to justify the loss of convenience.

When I first got it, there was an admin password on the BIOS, which was a significant reason for the ease with which I obtained it… I quickly removed the password with the help of the absolutely amazing Dogbert, whose blog can be found at http://dogber1.blogspot.com.

I’ve installed Arch Linux on it, as per usual, and it runs GNOME-Shell marvelously. As of now, it’s yet to stutter on any task I’ve put to it, and I believe it’s a very well-specced laptop. I’m sure I’ll be posting more about it in the future, but at the moment I believe I shall conclude this post. Farewell, and please do look forward to my future posts, which shall hopefully become more frequent.

— platnicat