Carl’s Blog

Quick update on my new Dell B120 laptop. CompUSA had a sale this past weekend on Netgear 802.11g USB adapters so I picked one up for $30 (after rebate). I also got 512MB of off-brand memory, which I returned last night to get some much cheaper Kingston memory from CircuitCity ($40 after rebate). Everything seems to be going okay so far. I’m trying to do this “the right way” by having a user account and an administrator account. It’s actually a real pain in the ass to have to jump over the admin account all the time to do any installing. At least fast user switch is accessible with WINDOWS-L.

I have had a few stability problems. I thought that it could’ve been the off-brand memory, but I don’t think so. It has blue-screened on me twice! Neither time did I manage to write down the relevant information because it reboot so fast. I don’t know if it’s a “feature” of XP so that it comes back fast, or if I was just typing at the time that it crashed. Either way, I need to try to figure that out.

The fact that this one is widescreen is kind of interesting. I do with the resolution was little bigger. Right now it’s 1280×800 and my old laptop was 1600×1200, so it is a change to get used to. It’s working out fine for now.

The other big change is that I’m trying to be nicer to this laptop’s battery. I know some people will say that it doesn’t matter because you’ll have to buy a new battery anyway in a short amount of time. But my older laptop had a battery that would last for maybe five minutes off of AC power. With this one I’m taking the battery out of the machine when it’s on AC power, which is the most frequent use. That should extend the battery life significantly by preventing it from going through recharge/discharge cycles.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 7th, 2006 at 8:31 am and is filed under Laptop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.