by I’ve been trying to figure out how to make a few things easier on myself recently. First and foremost, I like to be able to keep up on my email wherever I am, at home, at work, or on the road.
My home office was specifically built in the basement far away from everyone else, so that I could be undisturbed while working. However, that is not conducive to times when I want to work and still be able to be disturbed (new baby coming soon, want to hear her if she starts crying after everyone else goes to bed; wife needs sleep now so need to hear if other kids wake up after she goes to bed; etc).
On the road or at work, I’m reliant upon my work laptop. Security has been getting crazy about installing any non-standard software (it is now potentially a termination offense to install Firefox, Skype, or IRC on our laptops). Additionally, when I’m flying, I like to watch a movie, and work has been cracking down on installing DVD-playing software.
Finally, I like to play with new technologies. I’m a registered OpenSolaris developer, I’ve been known to be a Perl Hacker in the past. I’m a semi-professional web developer. It would be nice to have these easily available to me to play with when the mood strikes.
This all equates to I wanted (need is a real stretch) a personal laptop. This weekend, the tax check finally came in (yes, we were really slow at filing this year), CompUSA had an unbeatable deal on an Acer Aspire 9300, so I broke down and bought it. Turion X2 (TL-50), 1G of memory, nVidia Geforce 6100 graphics, 17″ WXGA+ widescreen LCD, 120G HD, CD/DVD+R-DL/DVD+-RW, built in wireless, and Gig Ethernet. $100 instant savings, $100 mail in rebate. $799 total price, pretty unbeatable. Closest competitors I could find were either $999 (no savings) or had smaller screens and less memory/disk.
First thing I tried to do was install Solaris X86 on it. It didn’t work first try, but I’m finally making headway. I’ll have another post that tracks my progress.