Wednesday, September 24, 2008

What's that in the keyboard tray?

What, you may ask, is that thing in the keyboard tray? It's a laptop. A third laptop. My desk is stupid. And the worst thing is, I really enjoy how stupid it is.

The third laptop, in all fairness, doesn't belong to me. It's Dave's $200 Craigslist special that he bought to have a beater for tour purposes. It's perfectly adequate for web purposes, but otherwise, well, a OLPC would probably be a better computer. (And far niftier. If I were going to allow a fourth laptop to come live in my desk area, it would have to be a OLPC.)  Come to think of it, perhaps I should make one of these spare laptops a Linux machine. It would have to be my old computer (the Dell XPS, left) because there's still the chance that Dave might want to use his mostly abandoned laptop, and he'd probably expect it to still be running XP when he did.

The XPS, now that it's been supplanted by the mac, really doesn't do anything except sync with my windows mobile phone for backup purposes (I don't really want to waste the space on my windows partition on the mac with Outlook, not when there's this perfectly good computer that already has that job) and run Azureus. The keyboard tray computer has only one task, and that's to sync up with the scanner for my part-time extra money gig. You would think that the two things that need to sync with a PC could share, but no, it turns out that they both want different versions of active sync (the scanner is seriously old) and the two versions refuse to coexist. Jerks. So that's why it lives in the keyboard tray, it's not called upon all that often.

I think the only way to make this less lame is to either get rid of one of these or install Linux on the XPS. Otherwise this is just stupid. (But neatly so. I even have a little black stool for the XPS to live on.)

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