For those of you who didn't read my previous blog post, yesterday school randomly called me and said, "Hey, APS is giving you a free laptop, come pick it up," so I was like "Sweet" and went to get it today. Here are some numbers:

Windows XP Pro SP3
1.59 GHz AMD Turion 64
1GB RAM, possibly 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM, but I dunno for sure
100GB hard drive
15.4" widescreen
Nice battery life; this specs page says 4.5 hours, but mine is clearly a cheap knockoff of this model.
This site also claims it has an ATI Radeon X1250, which may or may not be true.

Predictably, it isn't exactly a dream machine, but the price was right! It might be okay if I upgrade the RAM, but 1.6 GHz is not great, and I don't know what kind of software I'm going to need to be running at MIT. I haven't decided whether I'm keeping it or pawning it and getting a new one at the end of the summer. I guess I could just use it my first year and get a better one later if I need to.

EDIT: You know, I think I am going to keep it. It'll at least last me through my first year of college, I'm thinking, and if I need to get another one, nothing lost because this one was free! I wouldn't get a whole lot of money for this anyway, so I really might as well hang onto it.

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Life in Mintland, take two. Life in Mintland! Quick review on Christropher Paolini's Eragon that I wrote for school.

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Halon - May 31, 2008 (07:33 AM) It's about as good as my laptop that I spent $1200 on. Only problem is I bought it two and a half years ago. =/ It's fine for general use and most programs should run ok. The only programs I use are Maple and Matlab, the former is a little slow when I do huge calculations but for the most part fine. Unless you plan on running some hard core simulation programs or gaming (if you want the latter you shouldn't be using a laptop, period) you're fine. Not sure how it will last when you're a junior/senior, but for now it's fine and you can't beat the price.