I believe I will be using my old laptop again, as my main computer. When I relocated I surrendered my fave-rave laptop — a 1Ghz Dell Inspiron 8000, frilled to the gills with every upgrade and gizmo I could find — to a family member to use as they saw fit (with a fresh installation of Ubuntu as a bonus).

As luck would have it, the family member is shipping it to me … not because it’s broken or unusable or anything, but because it’s no longer feasible for them to keep it. The shipping cost will be high, but what it means is that my pinnacle of turn-of-the-century computer hardware will be mine to use again.

It’s good news, really. I do like that old laptop, even if it’s not cutting edge by any stretch of the imagination. It should get here in about 10 days, if the U.S. Postal Service’s predictions are at all accurate.

Of course, it won’t be connected to the Internet from home, so I’ll have to drag it into the office and leech off their connection until I can get all my ducks in a row and arrange for at-home service. I’m patient, though. I’m not in any hurry. And if my plot to commander the ancient Sotec I mentioned in an earlier post goes as planned, I should have a decent little pair of notebooks as my home work station.

I had thought about picking up a new computer here, and I still might do that. But for what I’ve seen thus far, the casualty rate among computer discards is as high in Japan as it was in the U.S. I might be able to collect a fair number of supposed invalids, even though I doubt I’ll be picking up any dual Xeon Pentium 4 servers at the local recycling center, like last year. 😉