Alison Young

I bought Guild Wars on Saturday. It’s not WoW but then again it doesn’t try to be. A lot of the things that annoyed me about WoW aren’t a problem in GW. To me GW is also a lot harder – you have to rethink strategy a lot more and stop relying on the strength of a lot of others to get you through.

My new Dell arrived safe and sound on Friday and is now running mostly happily with Ubuntu. Need to have a play and see if I can get wireless working happily at uni tomorrow. I’ve moved onto the next level of geek, I have a desktop pc and a notebook which runs linux entirely. Ielenia and Nostariel. Ielenia’s new home is coming soon…

I got a phone call yesterday, my Dell is being delivered Friday morning between 9a and 1p. I can hardly wait, however I’m going to have to wait for the batteries to charge once it arrives.

Then I can start playing with installing Linux. It was suggested I do some research to find out if I can run 2 distros that share the home directory between them. Will have to research and see. The reason for 2 distros is that people have had the most success with getting everything to work using Ubuntu but I had a bad experience with it once and am doubtful to try it again – though I suspect I will. I’m also wanting to put Fedora on there because it’s great and I know how most things work there. Decisions decisions.

It all started when I checked back with the Dell site to see if those wicked deals were still happening and sure enough luck was with me. Today was the last day. After some browsing and choosing between a couple of models I settled on something which had a slightly less gutsy processor and 20G less of a hdd (who needs a 100G laptop hdd anyway) resulting in something more my budget. Added some extras of my own and I still wound up paying about what I originally expected

Details for the more technically inclined:
CPU: Inspiron 630M Intel(R) Pentium (R) Processor at 725 – 1.60GHz, 2MB cache, 400MHz FSB
RAM: 1024MB DDR2 SDRAM
Hard Disk: 80GB Ultra ATA Hard Drive
Optical Drive: Internal 8X DVD+/-RW Combo drive with dual layer write capabilities
Screen: 14.1″ WideScreen XGA TFT with TrueLife (1280×800 res)
Graphics: Intel(R) Media Accelerator 900 Graphics up to 128MB shared system memory
Battery: 6-cell 53Whr Lithium Ion Primary Battery
Adapter: 65W AC Adapter
Wireless: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200 (802.11b/g) 54Mbps Mini-PCI Wireless Card
Bluetooth: Dell Wireless 350 Bluetooth Module (internal)
Modem: Internal 56k Modem
Carry Case: Deluxe Leather Case
Extras: Spare battery and power adapter.

I spoke to somebody at Dell about not including the Windows stuff as I plan to run Linux on it and they said no as apparently Windows is supposed to be a freebie anyway. They did however offer me a free case.

Delivery is in approx 5-8 working days.