Just A Couple More Feet
It’s hard wrapping my mind around the fact that MBA classes start next week (with plenty of training sessions in between, oh boy!), but much of this weekend was spent prepping Bunky’s old law school laptop to become my new business school laptop. Although the Inspiron 600m is nearly 3 years old, it seems to be running reasonably fast, after a hearty HD scrubbing. Bunky had the regular XP flavor, and since the Pitt network supposedly requires XP Professional, I decided an OS reinstall was in order.
Of course 3 years under Bunky rule is like 20 years in the desert for any electronic good, and the laptop is no different. We’ve gone through roughly a billion of those stupid Dell AC adaptors, and the keyboard had to be replaced. The battery is also pretty new. All but one of the rubber feet have fallen off, and I really want to get some self-adhesive rubber feet to replace the ones that have fallen off. This would make the laptop sit evenly, and more importantly would help with the airflow underneath the laptop (it gets very toasty). In spite of all the wear and tear, the laptop was not used very much this last year, so it really only got 2 years of hard use.
After backing up all of Bunky’s old emails (composed primarily of 50 billion shopping emails), My Documents, and pictures, I completely wiped the HD and reformatted it. There was some major weirdness with the partitions, with the main 20Gig partition, an unused 8Gig partition, and a random small FAT partition. WTH? Anyway, I deleted all of them, and reformatted the whole thing as NTFS. The installation of Windows XP did not take very long, as I still had the slipstreamed disc I had made back in April. Not having to install SP1 and SP2 was a godsend, especially since it took a while to get the Ethernet Controller and internal Wireless drivers to work.
Although the hard drive is a paltry 28Gigs and the laptop only sports a 1.5GHz Pentium M and 512Mb RAM, I am pleased at how well everything is running so far. Bunky had some seriously messed up settings, but the main problem seems to have been all the craptastic Dell drivers/utilities. I went to the websites of the hardware manufacturers to download drivers this time, and these drivers appear to be of vastly superior quality. Also, there are no longer all these strange useless programs running in the background. I’ve set up the OS for max performance, so the laptop is using the Windows Classic theme instead of the Windows XP theme.
The one disappointment in the process was when i cracked open the disc of programs that Pitt provided us with. They made it sound like it was filled to the brim with AWESOME, but the CD was mostly full of PDF files and a bunch of programs that are available for free already (e.g. Adobe Reader, Spybot, Shockwave). The only non-free program on it was Symantec Anti-Virus, Corporate Edition. Since I know we pay an IT fee, this is pretty disappointing. I was kinda hoping to get Vista for free or something, haha. Or at least Battlefield 2142, jeez.
