InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "This is my BOOM STICK!"

chibirisuchan (chibirisuchan) wrote,
@ 2009-03-10 22:11:00

I has a shiiiiny
Paid off the last of the flood-related credit card bills with income tax return (woooot!) THEN I got $400 the state has owed me for 6 months that I thought I'd never see because of the budget crisis but hey mailbox surprise of the good kind! :3

And the last time I bought a new laptop? 1993. (I bought a thoroughly used one in 2001, but even at the time it was too unpatchable to network, and it's older than the invention of USB ports so if it doesn't fit on a floppy I'm doomed. So yeah. Kinda time for a new laptop. I've been doing just fine for years on work laptops, but it'd be nice to have one that was honest-to-goodness *mine,* y'know? Plus the hilarious part is I'll probably use it more at work than my work laptop, on account of how I most often use a laptop at work when in meetings or training sessions that last several hours and don't always have power handy. The official work laptop gets about 2 hours on a charge. This one? 9 1/2 according to specs, which I figure is probably 6 real-life. Still. Battery power goooood!)

...so. Shiiiiiny. :3 Should be here some time next week.

o-omg I really REALLY hope the self-indulgence is not an indicator that it's time for my basement to flood again...

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	wanderingscroll 2009-03-11 12:18 am UTC (link)
	Congrats! tosses a nut at your Evil Ninja Squirrel (Reply to this) (Thread)

	chibirisuchan 2009-03-11 09:46 am UTC (link)
	XD thanks! ninja squirrel makes nut vanish like whoa! 'cause it is NINJA squirrel! (Reply to this) (Parent)

flffybunnyslppr
2009-03-11 12:29 am UTC (link)

Is very shiny. Did you get the blue one shown? One thing I would recommend (if you're going to use Vista) is to upgrade the DDR memory to at least 2GB. Also, make sure you back up the files you want to keep. I recently had my hard drive die (had to get a new one) and lost everything. I don't want anyone to go through what I did, so I make sure to tell anyone and everyone (when the subject of computers comes up) to back up their files. Hope the compy works out well for you!

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chibirisuchan
2009-03-11 09:48 am UTC (link)

XD yep - it was actually on sale for less than the black one when I was looking at it.

Vista - ick ptui! No, I'm HAPPILY using XP. In fact that one one of the biiiiig deciders behind me going for a netbook -- with netbooks you can still buy XP, whereas with full notebooks they push you into Vista and then charge you an extra $150 for an XP license that sometimes doesn't even install. So yeah, netbook and XP ho for me!

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	teamromy 2009-03-11 08:18 am UTC (link)
	Oooh! So jealous. We would love a laptop for school purposes, but alas we are poor and we can't justify the expense when we have a perfectly good desktop. But we might have to save up for a new fan for it, so that would be where the money goes. But you know...your purchase is so shiny! ^_^ (Reply to this) (Thread)

chibirisuchan
2009-03-11 09:54 am UTC (link)

*hugs* I'm sorry!

You know, the last time I booted that old Win 95 system, it did still work. The two killers for me were lack of networking (lethal at work) and floppy-only (lethal when you have to move big graphics files around at work).

But if you're just looking for a portable word processor, once my new one gets here I could send my old one to you for like $20 plus shipping?

I'd have to go back and boot it and clean it off and make sure it still worked before I said that for absolutely sure, but it would still be a portable word processor (and it has a CD reading drive in it so you could listen to music while typing. XD)

It does take PCMCIA cards, so you could technically make it wireless or Ethernet networking compatible. I just didn't because I know that there isn't a way to patch it and I suspect nobody still writes professional antivirus software for it, so it was much safer to keep it off the net.

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	chibirisuchan 2009-03-11 09:56 am UTC (link)
	....you know, the fact that it does take PCMCIA cards makes me realize that with a CF adapter, you could more than double its drive space just by popping in a 2-4 gig CF card in the PCMCIA. Heh. And then the CF card could be the big file transfer mechanism! Couldn't use both the CF card and a network card at the same time, though... (Reply to this) (Parent)

theweranarchist
2009-03-12 08:19 pm UTC (link)

Genesis just came in and told me to look at Yazuu's comment and your reply - you are so sweet, I am utterly floored!

We had been talking as a family about getting a laptop/notebook for them to use at school and for us to use for writing, no internet necessary - out of curiosity, can it use an external memory stick/key for data storage, or is it strictly floppies? There are a couple of "computer doctors" nearby and we could probably tweak it if needed for far less than getting a new one...

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chibirisuchan
2009-03-12 08:48 pm UTC (link)

It's older than USB connectors, so its only "standard" connection method is an external floppy drive on a custom connector that nothing uses anymore.

But it does have a PCMCIA slot on it, and that you can use for one of those PCMCIA to digital camera storage card converters if you have something else that can also talk to the digital camera storage card. (My digital camera takes CF cards, so I've got a PCMCIA to CF adaptor that can go into the old notebook and then the CF card gets read on my digicam card reader that connects via a USB port. Yeah, it's pretty darn convoluted... but it would theoretically give you both more file storage and a way to get things back and forth that wouldn't be a floppy.)

Here's some links to the kinds of critters I'm talking about:

PCMCIA to CF adapter

PCMCIA Ethernet adapter (possible network option) though I haven't checked to see whether this particular model is Windows 95 network-stack compatible

64 MB CF Card (I know this will work because I have one this size in my camera that I've used with a PCMCIA adapter, and it's basically 64 floppies on one bitty thing... but the several-gig cards would give you basically the entire size of the critter's hard drive in the same amount of space if Windows 95 is capable of recognizing them, which I haven't actually tested out due to not owning anything higher than 256 mb for my camera.)

Kingston 2 GB CompactFlash Card (this would basically double the drive space on the machine if it'll read it)

SanDisk 16 MB CompactFlash Card (SDSFB-16-455) This would be 8x the drive space -- but I don't think Windows 95 has the capacity to recognize the existence of this much storage.

Anyway, possible food for thought? If you guys are interested, I'll try to get the old box booted up and cleaned up this weekend. I'm also not sure how good its battery is anymore, but its power adapter has always worked fine if you're thinking libraries or places reasonably close to power (or even sitting by the TV typing and watching, which is also fun. :D)

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chibirisuchan
2009-03-12 08:56 pm UTC (link)

For the lulz, here's the specs on the laptop in question:

Toshiba Tecra 730 XCDT

It was "state of the art" about five years before I bought it, and since I bought it when I got laid off during the last recession in 2001 (because my 1993 laptop had literally just had its screen blow out that week), that'd make it somewhere around 13 years old. But it made a perfectly good word processor-and-MP3-player. (Heh. With extra bonus Solitaire!) Just don't ask it to do networking or play videos.

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chibirisuchan
2009-03-12 09:05 pm UTC (link)

--Aha! And the old beast is theoretically capable of running Windows 2000 on it, if you did want to turn it into a word processor with LOTS of mp3s and use one of those high-gig CF cards in it.

Windows 2000 would make it less chancy to network -- not completely safe, on account of how 2K's not being patched anymore so you'd have to use something like AVG, a couple of antispyware systems, and ZoneAlarm to stop the icks before they arrived on the system. But since that PCMCIA slot could be used for a wireless or Ethernet card (and can be used to swap), you'd have options there if one of the local computer doctors can get 2K onto it for you. (I'm pretty sure it won't handle XP -- but then, I haven't actually tried, and maybe one of your docs could give that an assessment?)

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	raisedbymoogles 2009-03-11 02:40 pm UTC (link)
	Hooray for shinies! :DD (Reply to this) (Thread)

	chibirisuchan 2009-03-11 10:58 pm UTC (link)
	(nodnodnod) I keep checking Amazon to see if they've shipped it yet. XD (Reply to this) (Parent)