I am in the habit of not taking my laptop to my lab to avoid distraction. To me the laptop has become an entertainment device not a utility item. When I bought the laptop in 2006, I badly needed it for my work. It was getting difficult with my desktop at home which had a celeron processor and 250mb of ram….enough said. I do all my programming on Linux and trying to make a dual boot system of that weakling desktop was a failed effort. When I got my laptop it was THE deal of the time. It’s a Toshiba satellite M115-S3094 with core duo 1.66Ghz and 512Mb ram which I instantly upgraded to 1.5Gig. This bundled with a DVD megadrive, a super 14″ TruBrite screen and all the usual stuff, my laptop cost me just over 600 dollars. Even at that time I was deeply in love with the Dell XPS 13″. But it was not meant to be. Nowadays I am tempted by the new Dell deals on the XPS and even at this point I wish to take nothing away from my laptop.
The code I have been working on produced unreasonable bugs on the desktop in my lab which is a super lazy Pentium III thankfully running Dapper which I thought was good enough for programming. Then I decided to run it on Loren’s(a colleague) computer. Loren never gives up on his laptop, which is older than mine. The code worked like a charm. So there were some build errors with the libraries I used on my lab machine, which needed recompilation. So in an effort to build the libraries I downloaded them and compiled them. This took about an hour and a half to finish. I decided to bring my laptop today to the lab and while I was compiling the libraries on the desktop, I installed linux on my laptop, installed compilers, downloaded the source code and compiled the libraries, and I even had time to compile my own code with out any errors whatsoever. All this done before the pentium 3 lazy bones finished its job. Isn’t that amazing? Besides, my laptop has looked really feisty facing the fawn.
My laptop has lived with dirt, slept with bed bugs and cockroaches, tolerated hundreds of strands of hair, traveled over 20000 miles on the plane, been dropped once, had to occasionally eat some of my meals and still it hasn’t let me down. Don’t you guys think it’s high time we treated our computers with love and care?
