Well, I've finally given up on my old Dell Inspiron 600m. It had it's good times, but in the end, two problems killed it.
1. Physical
At a party I hosted, a friends 2 year old girl fell off the bed, and landed head first on the Dell. Amazingly she was not really hurt. The next day I realised why, the LCD had softened the blow, and no longer worked.
2. HW bug
From when I purchased the machine (back in 2004), it occasionally had a problem, where for no apparent reason, the machine would run incredibly slowly (usually from power on). Over the years it became more frequent, now it happens most of the time. I've given up on trying to troubleshot this... but the same behaviour occurs both in Linux and Windows, so I'm fairly sure it's a hardware problem.
So now it's out with the old, in with the new -
Aspire one A150-A / 8.9" LED CB / Atom N270 1.6Ghz / UMA / 2*512 / 1*120GB / 802.11bg / 5-in-1 / SD / 3 cells / 0.3DV CrystalEye / Linux Lite / blue
One of these is on it's way to me now (I hope). In some markets the hard disk version of the Aspire one (A150) is sold only with it's Microsoft tax paid - Sweden is one such market. Fortunately in Finland and the UK, the Linux variant is sold.. and I managed to find a Swedish online store (Multitronic) that has Finnish roots - and they're selling the Finnish, Microsoft tax-free version here in Sweden.
So.. if you're wondering how much Microsoft taxes PC makers for XP, it seems to be 641 SEK (around $90US), give or take Swedish moms (or VAT), which is more difficult to avoid.
No comments:
Post a Comment