Twas the Gadget Binge before Christmas - Part 1

I've been on a bit of a gadget binge of late and it all started with a $750 off special at Dell a month ago. However before I get into that there's another story to be told about reviving and old laptop.

I'd sort of been looking for a laptop, my old 1999 vintage Toshiba having pretty much bitten the dust. It wasn't a bad machine and five years ago it was hot stuff. 466Mhz Celeron, 128Mb of RAM, a DVD drive, and a single USB 1.0 port - woo-hoo I thought and plonked down $2000 or so my dot.com had told me I could spend on a new machine. I even tried to watch DVDs on it for a bit - but without a hardware decoder the CPU was barely able to keep up, and the 16 bit graphics and TFT LCD were hard pushed to display movies with much chromatic fidelity.

Having remained pretty much unused for about two years I eventually decided I would take it for a spin on a month long trip to Europe. Being so old I figured it wouldn't matter too much if it died or got stolen along the way. The only problem was its battery was long since incapable of holding a charge which would make getting through airport security in the USA a problem if they wanted to see it flashing lights and doing stuff... So I'd been going to shell out $60 or so to get it a new Lion battery and upgrade it to Windows XP. That, I thought should make it usable again. However it turned out that the DVD-ROM drive had died at some point, and even after opening up the case, taking it out, poking at it and all the connectors I could still not get it to work.

The result was I dug out a mechanically broken but still remarkable functional Psion 3a, a marvel of a machine in a great little package and now over ten years old. More to the point its still supported by software for Windows that syncs with all my Windows address books and calendars, plus imports and exports files better than any Palm or PocketPC device I've ever used. I can even mount its drives on my PC and my PC drives on it for plain old file copies. The only limiting factor was its 19200 baud serial port! Plus it had a decent keyboard I could type on and ran on ubiquitous AA batteries. What, I asked myself, had I been thinking when I stopped using it? Probably that I was for the most part too lazy to organize myself consistently, and also that I eventually went in search of something with email and network connectivity. The ancestors of the Psion devices are embodied in Symbian OS based devices, but sadly Symbian is mostly only found in Nokia hardware which I loath with a passion. There have been rumours that Psion will return to making PDAs and I sincerely hope they do, functionaly I think they were the closest thing to the perfect PDA I've yet to encounter. With a contemporary screen, CPU, memory and connectivity I'd been reaching for my credit card before you could say "loads-a-money"!

Anyway, on my return from Europe and in a fit of boredom I eventually decided to do some more extensive open case surgery on the aforementioned Toshiba. Our local used computer recycling guy dug up a drive from an IBM laptop for $10 which I hacked up (literally) and managed to get working. Unfortunately the Tosh would not recognize it as a device to boot from so I had to remove its hard drive, install it in 2.5" USB drive enclosure, format it, put DOS on it, put it back in the laptop, copy Windows XP install files from the CD drive and then, finally, boot into DOS and run the Windows XP setup program. The hardest part was actually finding and installing a working DOS onto the drive. Nearly all sites assume you'll be doing that on a floppy and I don't have a floppy drive on the Tosh, nor on any other machine to even write.

But after I managed to get its OS upgraded the Tosh was quite usable so long as you don't run more than one application at a time. I may even get it a new battery one day, and perhaps a bigger hard drive - I've given serious thought to putting Linux on it and using it as my server since as a laptop it is very quite and small. All I need to do is get it a network adapter PCMCIA (this machine is so old it only had a modem). The fact that it wont boot from the CD-ROM still bothers me. For crash recovery that wont be very convenient, and the slowness of the USB 1.x port will hamper doing backups - I'd probably have to use the other PCMCIA card slot to provide a USB 2.0 port.

So eventually all this laptop surgery got me to thinking I should bite the bullet and get a brand spanking new laptop that was smaller, lighter and faster. The fact that I'd recently identified a lovely petite machine by Fujitsu that fit the bill wasn't helping. Fortunately I'm unemployed and my old friend and tech lemming went out and bought one the day after I mentioned it to him. Buy the time he'd finished maxing out its memory at 2Gb, and amping up its hard-drive to a custom 60Gb 7200rpm he'd parted with about 3 grand, way over my budget. So I went back to the drawing board and started contemplating the bottom end of laptops and wondering what compromises I'd make.

Which is about when Dell came along with their $750-off special offer and is about when I break for Episode 2, the gadget lust continues.