Of possible interest…

So I’ve recently gotten around to buying a laptop, up to now I’ve not really thought I needed one (and still do), but I was convinced by the large deposit my parents made in my bank account <Insert giant shrug here>, one thing for sure it will make being at home more pleasant which is an upside.

This will probably make a few people cringe, but I went with a Dell as they gave me the most bang for my buck, T7500, only 2GB of RAM because I decided to change the specs to something more useful to me, and aside from the fact that I couldn’t change the graphics option (Intel X3100) and the enormous delivery charge of GBP60 there is really nothing to fault them.

While mentioning delivery, they put my system together on the same day I ordered it, sent it out on Sunday and I had it by Tuesday, so again pretty fast but for that much money you really do expect them to overnight it, considering that I know overnight delivery for 6kg costs around GBP50.

It came with Vista, which is a giant pile of junk but then I’m no fan of Windows anyway, so I may keep it or use an MSDNAA copy of XP instead, I want to keep some compatibility for uni stuff (Damn them!).

Once I’ve backed up the masses of stuff I have somehow already managed to generat, I will reformat the drive, getting rid of the crappy backup partitions Dell have set up for a start, then installing Lunix!

I’ve always wanted to try a couple of set-ups, including encrypted disk and SE Linux patches, so I’ll probably do that, as well as a shell script I have probably lost, but which is still floating about (could always write it I guess) which will allow remote command execution by reading instructions off web server, like a laptop lojack, but not.

I commented on something similar on arsgeek a while ago, and it looks like they have changed the instructions to acknowledge the fact not everyone uses something Debian based, so it should be fun if it works, and since the laptop has an integrated webcam it could turn out to be of some use.

This engadget post mentions laptop chop shops, while to be expected is slightly scary, good thing your average thief sees not to be as organised and probably just sells it on via eBay.

I’ll let you know how I get on.