A quick apology first, for a lapse over the past few days. I ran into a particularly busy spell at work, and added to some other extra-curricular responsibilities, it made it impossible to update this site. On the other hand it also made it impossible to make any progress in these “Linux adventures,” so nothing was particularly lost.
I did accompany a friend to a computer retailer on a computer shopping trip. The winning prize was a rather nice machine by my standards — possibly one I would have bought myself a few months ago, if I had seen it first. It’s an NEC VersaPro model VY22X/RX-M, housing a 2.2Ghz Celeron, 256Mb of memory, a 20Gb hard drive, USB2.0, an ATI Radeon 330-series graphics card on a 1024×768 LCD, a CDROM, Windows XP (in Japanese) and a floppy drive.
Considering that the focus of this machine will be common desktop tasks, like surfing and watching Flash videos, it’s fine. It was a little sluggish at start — actually very sluggish — but I added a leftover 256Mb stick of DDR333 and it hums along quite well. It’s a sizable machine — easily bigger than any of the computers I keep on hand — but I think that was actually a selling point for the buyer.
The price was good too — under US$200 with a 30-day lemon guarantee, and the seller threw in an off-the-shelf DVD reader-writer identical to the one I bought two weeks ago. Considering that my friend was expecting to pay twice that amount, it was an easy choice.
Overall the computer is in solid condition, no physical defects, flexible enough to handle everyday chores, and should have a few more years of action left in it. We’ll see how it goes from here. …
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i guess you forgot an *evil face* at the end =)
Here’s one for you: 😈 You should insert that into your avatar. 😉
oh yeah, )))
nice specs for the money-im in the us on the east coast and I wish we had some retail stores here besides pawn shops and thrift shops to “see,smell,touch,and taste”older laptops before we buy.I don’t think I could ever buy a used lappy without doing those things first.
Any one reading if your near Philadelphia and know of a store or two please let me know.
Ive been searching craigs,as well as the above places for now a while for something in the 750-1500 mhz range for months now and have yet to find the “right” machine with this in my mind
https://kmandla.wordpress.com/2009/09/25/howto-pick-out-an-old-computer/
thanx and have a good one all
So what os will it be running.
And i bet if you weren’t with your friend, he/she would have bought a costlier machine 😉
Some of those old celeron machines have incredible specs. The last laptop my partner paid full price for was a hp4315ap (we’re in New Zealand). It had a 2.2GHz Celeron which flew like the clappers, ran Linux like a dream and was new in 2000AD. If the cooling assembly hadn’t gone haywire, I’d still be using it today instead of this 1.6GHz AMD Sempron donkey I had to get to replace it.
Your friend got an incredible deal, well done 😀
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