The other day I finally ordered a macbook. Got some memory upgrades and a slightly larger hard disk. Currently FedEx says that it's in Anchorage, AK. I'm very excited about not using slow hardware. Now I just have to figure out what to do with my old "waffle iron" laptop.
In case anyone is wondering what 'ol waffly is, it's a Toshiba Satellite something-or-other from like 2002. It had a smallish hd then (20G), smallish memory (256M) for the time it was bought. I've been using this constantly for everything. Often the cpu is near maxing out, the hd is thrashing because there is no space left and there is no free memory. Needless to say, it runs hot most of the time.
After all the load I've put it under, the battery still holds power for close to 3 hours, I have not had a major failure (knock on wood), and it's still kicking along. Now that I am thinking about it, I'm actually really impressed. It's not pretty, light, fast or cool, but it's worked pretty consistently for 5 years without wiping the disk. I hope that my new macbook will do as well.
Have you ever wiped the OS clean on it? You might see a nice performance improvement.
ReplyDeleteNo, I never wiped it. Probably should have. But I don't think that would really fix up the small hd and low amount of ram.
ReplyDeleteBiggest performance improvement that I have gotten: uninstalled Norton. It made sense to have that when I connected directly to the net with dial up, not as much when I am always behind a router.
Well, there's still lots of good uses for that laptop. Assuming it has Wifi and S-Video out, you could put it under your TV and use it to watch shows you may have recorded with your TV tuner or download from completely legitimate movie downloading sites. If you aren't into the whole media centre thing, it still probably has enough juice for browsing the web. It's probably better to have that sitting beside your couch when you want to quickly look up something on the internet rather than going over to your real computer, but you're buying a laptop, so that probably won't be an issue. Also, buy an external 500+ GB drive (futureshop seems to have a lot at reasonable prices) and turn it into a file server. It has way more than enough power to operate for this function. And lastly, if you just don't want it lying around, there's lots of used computer shops that would give you a few bucks for it, and could probably find a nice home for it.
ReplyDeleteOr better yet, buy 2 oven heaters in Home Depot and turn it into a Foreman Grill. I hear those old motherboards soak up the grease like crazy.
ReplyDeleteOne possibility that I was thinking of was along those lines.
ReplyDeleteI like to have bacon in the morning. I was thinking of putting it beside my bed with some bacon it in and setting it to turn on 30 min before I get up. My only fear is that I'll forget about it one morning and burn my foot on it. :-/
Mmmmm... bacon....
Put it under your desk and use it as a foot heater then :)
ReplyDelete