Bucket

So a friend of mine hands me his old work laptop. It's a Dell Latitude PPX and in amazing shape for its age. At first, I was disappointed by its performance; the poor thing was running XP SP3. Now, after dropping in some hardware and Debian Linux, it's a snappy little machine.

Pentium 3 (Coppermine) 500MHz
128MB SDRAM 100MHz
8GB SSD
CD-ROM, 3.5" floppy, USB, infrared

Yeah, I bought an ATA solid state drive a while back and I've finally found a good use for it. Instead of that ancient 12GB plate drive grinding away, it's quick and quiet. I was pleasantly surprised to see that my PCMCIA network cards worked without any grief (wired and wireless!) I'd originally tried Windows 2000 and Puppy Linux on this machine, but I think Debian with Xfce gives me a good balance of performance and function.

Next on the agenda is to update the BIOS. I just found a useful feature in ImgBurn, my favorite optical burning software, to make bootable CDs from scratch. Let's hope it works.