My laptop, a crappy (and very heavy) old Dell Inspiron 1100, may not seem like much to you, but when I got it in 2003, I had been dying to have a laptop for, oh, I don’t know, six years or so, and the horrible Gateway laptop I’d borrowed from my father had never been usable, so it was fantastic to have a portable computer (well, portable in that it could probably be used as a very effective portable bludgeoning weapon by He-Man) of my own that I could configure the way I wanted to and do what I wanted with. This laptop has traveled the world with me (to the extent that the other students in my German class in Düsseldorf laughed about me having it with me all the time), written my prelim exam with me, processed thousands of pictures, given me access to my beloved when we were both away from home, written at least one novel, answered more emails than I want to think about, and generally been my buddy.
Sure, there have been bad times, and to be honest, of late, I’ve used my desktop much more than my laptop except for when I go out or when my big pregnant body is more comfortable typing while sitting on a birthing ball than on my desk chair. And it wasn’t the most convenient laptop of all time – I did need to drag my PCMCIA WiFi card with me all the time, and everything about it was bulky and inconvenient. And the bad times were bad… the time my evil husband accidentally got snow in my laptop (and my ensuing freakout afterwards when it didn’t work for a couple of days), and the first cascade of malfunctions (battery dying -> adapter frying -> motherboard snap-crackle-popping), and the endless trying to get WiFi card drivers working under Linux… this pretty much sucked. But for the most part, it’s been an excellent tool and I’ve used the heck out of it.
The first cascade of malfunctions, though, happened after about 2 years. Fortunately, it was still on warranty, and so once the motherboard was replaced (and I got a new adapter and battery), all was good again. Now it’s about two years later, and all of a sudden, the same things are happening again. The battery isn’t holding as much charge, and for some reason, when the adapter is plugged in, it will occasionally go to battery power for a split second, and there’s sort of a random chance the computer will shut down during that second, which, if I’m very unlucky, has a tendency to corrupt things I’d rather not have corrupted. The adapter itself isn’t in great shape, and, well, I’m not going to be really surprised if the motherboard goes next, although I’ve no real technical reason to believe it will other than the fact that I sort of suspect the last time it went it had something to do with the crappy adapter doing something naughty (I’m just guessing that based on the sound it made when it died…). The point is this – it’d cost me about half as much to get a new adapter and battery for this gigantic mammoth of a laptop as it will cost me to get another (newer) laptop, and I’ve given in.
Ever since my evil husband pointed out the really, really small and lightweight ASUS Eee 4G which came out this month (and costs about $400), I’ve been thinking of getting one. Sure, there are more powerful laptops out there for only slightly more than this one, but this little guy is small and has everything I really need. It runs Linux (though it apparently can run XP), which is all I really need in a laptop, and while it doesn’t have a whole lot of storage space, Linux doesn’t really need it – when I use my laptop, I need something with WiFi and ethernet, some USB ports for devices, some sort of removable storage (this guy takes SD cards, as does our new videocamera, so it’s all good!), and the ability to run the applications I need. I don’t need a gaming PC, I don’t need to run heavy office applications (and if I did, there’s always OpenOffice), and I’m not going to be doing a whole lot of heavy processing on it (most of the time, if I need to do big computations, I can do them on some other computer or over the network, so no big deal…). But I also don’t want a handheld phone-plus-some-web-apps device – that’s not enough computer for me, and I can’t change the OS on it or anything else. This little guy has what I want and lacks what I don’t, so really, this seemed like a good fit for me. No need to carry a bunch of peripherals (a USB stick and an SD card are *nothing*, and I don’t need a DVD-ROM drive on my laptop), and it’s easy to carry. Considering that I’m going to be carrying something much heavier for most of my days in the near future, a lightweight laptop is just the thing 
And now, now that my poor laptop has decided to leave me… now my new little 2-pound laptop is on its way. It probably won’t come until after the baby does, but given the fact that going out to the coffee place to write is becoming increasingly uncomfortable anyway, I think I can do without a laptop for a while. I’m pretty sure that once the baby gets here, the laptop is not going to be on the top of my list of things to be thinking about anyway
So to my lovely, incredibly large laptop, I say goodbye, and thanks for the hard work.
Professional computer geek and linguist living in Germany, doing infosec stuff and being the freakiest mother ever.
I love that you post about your computer. Did you happen to name it? In college (eons ago) I had the only computer on my floor and I shared it with everyone, because the wait time was less that in the communal computer lab, so we decided to name my Mac, Harold. Boy do I miss Harold! (We also held a contest to name the three fish that were the screen saver, but I can’t remember what we named them now
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I love the stickers and decals on your computer! I am so neat-obsessed with mine that I cannot bear to put stickers on it. My son does that for me.
Karen: Nope, I didn’t name it.
It’s just a thing with me – I don’t name computers (or iPods, or calculators, for that matter) beyond, well, the system name, but that’s really for the network – my Windows partition was named “sandalwood”, I think, because a long time ago I thought I’d go for “things that smell good” as my network naming scheme, but my Linux partition on the laptop was called “bernd”, for my favorite German loaf of bread, who was obviously not chosen for his smell. I never would have referred to the computer aloud as either Bernd or Sandalwood though unless I was trying to differentiate one of our many computers from another
Mrs. Mustard:
It took me a long time to break down and put the first sticker on (the “no, this is not my boyfriend’s computer” sticker, and I only put that on because my then bf (now husband) and I were both computer scientists and I felt I had to announce my geek status aloud
) – once I’d done that, though, it sort of went nuts. The DefCon sticker was bought with the first one and went on sometime later for, I dunno, symmetry. But then I did NaNoWriMo, and I was all psyched, so the first NaNo sticker went up, and while I did that, I was writing at a coffee shop called “It’s a Grind”, and the manager was a friend of mine and stuck that on there…
And then I had the experience of being a pacifist working for a defense contractor, so the ACLU one went up (and the “I Voted” sticker, for God knows what reason…) and so on.
It just snowballed.
We’ll see what happens to the new one – so much less space! (Perhaps Sacha can plot a design for me
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