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by James Britt.
Original Post: New Laptop
Feed Title: James Britt: Ruby Development
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Feed Description: James Britt: Playing with better toys
My Dell 810 laptop arrived, earlier than expected. I like these sorts of surprises.
The machine is quite nice. It came with WinXP Pro; I'm far more used to, and tend to prefer, Win2K, which gets in the way less often. I'll now need to dig up XP configuration hacks to change or turn off assorted "features".
A big reason for picking this machine as that it includes a track-stick pointer (AKA, a clit mouse). The corresponding mouse buttons, though, are poorly designed. They are level with the surface of the laptop, which means that one has to arch the thumb in order to depress it without hitting the frame. My current hack is taping some folded paper on the left button to make it easier to click.
The machine has an 80 GB hard drive, with a single C: partition. I prefer to separate system files from data and application files, and decided to resize the C: partition and add a D: drive. Turns out that Knoppix works wonders for this. I grabbed the 3.9 Knoppix CD ISO, burned it to disk, and booted the laptop. The CD includes QTParted, which is just the GNU Parted disk partition utility with a QT GUI. And it worked great. I shrunk the C: partition down to 10GB, booted back into XP, and formatted the new partition. (QTParted also does formatting, but I decided that letting XP do this may be more reliable.) I changed the drive letter on the laptop DVD, set the new partition to D:, and I was set.
Now comes the Long March of application installation and configuration migration.
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