[EDIT: In the interest of gratitude, I should mention that it was my wonderful father who took pity on my non-mobile, technologically deficient state and offered me multiple hundreds of dollars more than I had asked him for to put toward what was initially supposed to be a crappy < $400 machine that would just barely cough through the ‘net with Firefox and maybe do some word processing on OpenOffice. It was a great blessing to have had him offer enough to purchase a machine that I’m certain will last me happily for several years. Thanks, Dad. ]

I didn’t want to pay hundreds of extra dollars for a name brand laptop, so I went with an [1] Acer Aspire AS5102WLMi, and couldn’t be more pleased. Sharp, high-contrast screen, dual-core AMD64 proc, and 2GB of RAM … they even kindly pre-partitioned the 120GB hard drive off in halves for me, so I can slam a little Gentoo when I’m able to reward myself for finishing the GRE!

On the other hand, UPS lost my package for almost a week. That was a remarkably infuriating experience, but I learned a little patience: when I finally gave up six days later and took a nap mid-day, it arrived.

I don’t have much else to report on this, other than that I’ll be taking detailed notes when I do put Linux on it, and let my readers know of any and all problems, solutions, regrets, and other such nonsense.

[EDIT: In the interest of gratitude, I should mention that it was my wonderful father who took pity on my non-mobile, technologically deficient state and offered me multiple hundreds of dollars more than I had asked him for to put toward what was initially supposed to be a crappy < $400 machine that would just barely cough through the ‘net with Firefox and maybe do some word processing on OpenOffice. It was a great blessing to have had him offer enough to purchase a machine that I’m certain will last me happily for several years. Thanks, Dad. ]

I didn’t want to pay hundreds of extra dollars for a name brand laptop, so I went with an [2] Acer Aspire AS5102WLMi, and couldn’t be more pleased. Sharp, high-contrast screen, dual-core AMD64 proc, and 2GB of RAM … they even kindly pre-partitioned the 120GB hard drive off in halves for me, so I can slam a little Gentoo when I’m able to reward myself for finishing the GRE!

On the other hand, UPS lost my package for almost a week. That was a remarkably infuriating experience, but I learned a little patience: when I finally gave up six days later and took a nap mid-day, it arrived.

I don’t have much else to report on this, other than that I’ll be taking detailed notes when I do put Linux on it, and let my readers know of any and all problems, solutions, regrets, and other such nonsense.