Computer changes
Lisa’s kick-ass new Dell workstation arrived this week. They originally gave the 9th of July as an estimated delivery date, but as usual, they delivered much earlier than they said they would. The machine has been setup and done some light duty (web surfing, etc) but this weekend we’ll be installing the development tools that Lisa needs to get started with our latest contract.
The machine is a bit of a beast: quad core processor, 3GB of memory, 500GB hard disk and two monitors (a 20″ and a 19″ LCD). It came in at a shade over AU$1500. Nice.
My Inspiron 9400 laptop has been doing duty as the house PC for a few months now, but with the arrival of the new machine I’m able to carry it around with me again.
Because it will always be with me I’m looking into client-side email applications. I’m a big advocate of web based mail (and in particular, web based mail that’s independent of your ISP) but the overall web email experience isn’t brilliant. Gmail works really well in the browser, but I really, really miss some things when I’m using it. The biggest of those is the ability to drop an image into an email message (as you can in Outlook). For development work that’s really important. I’m a heavy user of SnagIt for screen captures, because there’s nothing quite like grabbing a quick screenshot of something and firing it off in an email to explain something. Gmail just doesn’t let you do that. You’ve got to save the screenshot to an image file then manually attach that image to the message, and it’s just all too hard.
Right now I’m using Thunderbird as an IMAP client pointed at my Gmail account. It seems to work pretty well. I still get all the benefits of ISP independent email that’s web accessible, but I also get some of the things I miss from Outlook: dropping images inline into the body of email messages, decent outbound email signatures, etc.
Leo4All is another “distro” that seems quite good…
Currently trying to convince a Dell D620 laptop that it DOES want to finalise the load of iATKOS, but it doesnt boot nicely…
I would LOVE to run MacOS on this thing
Winblows development only…
I’ve considered running a Kalyway partition on my laptop. I think that when I need to reinstall the 9400 next time I’ll look at doing that. It’s essentially the same specs as a Macbook Pro anyway.
A machine like that would love to run MacOS….
just started playing with Kalyway, and it outperforms XP/Vista sooooooo well….
I am with Heidi though… Current priority for me is a Canon 40D….
$1500 with two screens that is such good value. I was looking a getting a new laptop from DELL but then decided that the SLR should come first – if my laptop struggles with the larger files from that then maybe I will need to get a new laptop