…it’s just childhood behaviour.
Whilst I’ve been looking after Amelia whilst Bex has been working this week I’ve been taking some photos of the cat, the pretentiously named Lucy Madison!
And my personal favourite one was as I got my laptop out to start putting some photos I had taken of my journey down (and to watch some TV *ahem*) she decided that I, obviously, wasn’t paying her the correct amount of attention. So she did what a cat does best….
And if you didn’t notice from that last picture I’ve got myself a new laptop. Well, I say got, but I’ve not paid for it. I’ve decided that on my renewal for my phone that I’d not get a new handset this time as there just anything out there that really grabs my attention at the moment. Android is still not mature enough, I don’t like any of the S60 5th edition phones that have come out so far (namely the 5800 or the n97) and all of the latest S60 3.2 phones are not really that much of a step up from my battered n85 so I’d be merely getting a phone for phones sake. So I’ve decided to get a laptop, or should I say netbook?, for myself instead. I went for the Dell Inspiron Mini 10v which is a beautiful little machine that weighs next to nothing, has a decent sized keyboard (I’m typing this on it now and the reduced 8% from a full size is not hugely noticebale) and I’m pretty much averaging the speed I’d normally get on my old laptop (The Dell Latitude D600.)
To be honest, the main reason for getting it was that my previous laptop has now completely died, wont boot, wont POST, wont do anything except for turn on the lights for a few seconds and then die. Oh well, it served me well and did a good job for what I paid for it what must be 2 or 3 years ago. And now I have a brand new one for free!
The specs of the machine are pretty much what you find in most netbooks:
An Intel Atom processor running at 1.66GHz/533MHz FSB.
1GB of DDR2 memory
Intel Graphics (GMA950)
10.1″ TFT with a max resolution of 1024×600
160GB 5400rpm Hard Drive
Wireless 802.11g
3 Cell Battery
So far, the problems I’ve found with the laptop are:
The touchpad. There is a YouTube video on this saying why they came up with the design that they have. But I’m not a huge fan, I think I’ll end up getting used to it. But I’ve always used touchpads with one finger resting on the left hand button ready to click and I’d never really gotten in to the whole tap to click that is present on laptops. That doesn’t work on this netbook as the two buttons are part of the actual touchpad. So I’m trying to teach myself to use single tap for left clicking!
There is no status indicators on the laptop, except for power. The power light is very beautiful and all, but in terms of usefullness quite low down on my list. I mean, if the computer is on I kinda know it as I can hear the hard drive’s (actually whisper quiet) whirr and I can see the screen on. Scroll lock and number lock are fine without as there is no number pad and let’s face it who the hell likes scroll lock these days. However, the ones I really miss are wireless connection status and hard drive activity light. So if you see me putting my laptop to my ear it’s because I’m trying to find if the thing is writing to the drive or not.
The speakers. I know you’re not gonna fit huge booming speakers in a tiny little netbook, but the volume isn’t very huge even at full volume it’s not enough to fill a room whilst you’re doing the washing up.
The pre-loaded version of Windows that came with the computer was massively overloaded, but a clean install and it boots up loads quicker. I’m not sure whether I’ll put Linux on it or not, as I’ve heard that the power management on Windows is a lot better. We’ll see. 
rocking
B
