Laptops

So... That Windows laptop I mentioned previously? Screen was destroyed. As a result, I have a laptop from eBay ordered.

Dell Latitude E1505.

Core Duo (can be upgraded to a Socket M Core2Duo), 2GB of DDR2-SDRAM (I can bring it up to a max of 4GB), Intel IGP... Not exactly the most capable system in the network, but it'll do what I need it to: playing videos and music, text editing, word processing, LaTeX (maybe), reading ePUB and PDF files, old games... Nothing too major. I'll throw Windows Vista onto it once I get my 1TB drive out of the MacBook, and maybe the 4GB of memory from it as well.

Applications I'm wanting to install:

- Office 2007
- Calibre
- Evince
- Pidgin
- IceChat 9
- New Moon (Pale Moon browser fork)
- Notepad3
- Gargoyle (Interactive Fiction player)
- Inform 7 (Interactive Fiction engine)
- Quest (Interactive Fiction player and engine)
- PuTTY
- WinSCP
- KeePassXC
- VLC
- WinAmp
- Quicktime

Games I'm thinking of installing:

- Age of Empires II Classic
- Age of Empires III + Expansions
- Turok
- Turok II: Seeds of Evil
- Megaman X4
- Final Fantasy VII PC (If it'll work)
- Final Fantasy VIII PC (If it'll work)
- Star Trek: The Next Generation - Birth of the Federation
- Minecraft
- DOOM Classic Trilogy
- Wolfenstein 3D + Spear of Destiny
- Croc: Legend of the Gobbos
- Croc 2
- Moto Racer

Might also look into getting a couple of emulators going for old games as well, like DOSBox and VBA. Definitely looking forward to having something I can relax with again (that won't lose several hours of work because of sleep issues).

Laptop upgrades

So... Before I even get the laptop, I've got 4GB of PC2-6400, a 1TB HDD, and a Core2Duo T7200 CPU, all to upgrade this thing further than what it's coming with. And I'm happy about that.

I'd been wanting the Dell Inspiron E1505 since I saw it back in Austin, TX, at the Goodwill Computerworks there. It was just a really nicely designed laptop, at least on the surface. The speakers and media buttons on the front of the topcase, the size of the laptop itself, and just the build quality of the systems I encountered at the time... It was one of those machines that just drew me to it.

And not many computers have done that to me. I can even name the others right now: the iMac G3, the eMachines eOne (iMac G3 PC ripoff), the Power Mac G3, Power Mac G4 Cube, and the 20th Anniversary Mac. Yeah, most are Macs, because those were beautiful machines in my eyes.

Yeah, it sounds shallow, but I like my visually appealing hardware, so long as it has the software to go with it.