Yep, the screen on my notebook is definitly not going to last long. It decided to flake out a bit at work today. Went totaly blank for about 10 second. A quick smack to the lighting element fixed that though.

I have another notebook on order. It should get here in a few days. I pray that it's soon enough. This one is just becoming a bear to use due to the screen. It's dark all of the time. To the point it's hard to read at times. Once in a while, it gets realy bright though. (rarely). That's annoying as well. Then thier is basicly no contrast. It's better dark.

The replacement unit is better, but not great. For 120$, what do you expect? It's a 486dx2/50 (underclocked to save power). 20 megs of ram (yea!), and an active matrix screen (toasty in the dark).

The funny thing is, I don't know much more about the unit, other than the fact that it's an NEC. No clue of the color, keyboard layout, or case design. Using lynx as a web browser (without being able to use zgv) sucks.

The memory is the biggest improvement. 8 megs of ram is pretty sad. I spend quite a bit of my time thrashing due to this (but I can live with it). The screen on this new unit does make my mouth water quite a bit. I've never owned a screen that was TFT. I hope thier are no dead pixels. That would drive me quite mad for a while. Then I'd eventualy get usto it. Hmm, actualy I'd probably never notice too much if they where on the extreme edge, or in a corner.

20 megs of ram, and color means I'll finaly get to put new pictures up on this site. Since I currently can't run X, I can't realy do much with images. I do have new ones though. I may just put those up tommorow (in a seperate directory), just for the fun of it. Why make you (my beloved reader) wait so long? Note that they will be quite large.

I also hope I can get X to work on it :) Due to it's age, it most likely has a C&T display. Actualy, I've never seen another notebook that age that didn't have that type of display. Hmm, well, one. The compaQ, contura aero. Also a very fine unit. Aside from having only 256k of video ram. But, who wants to run X on a 25mhz machine anyway?

When I was younger, I had one of those. I so loved my aero. 8 megs ram, 170 meg HD, a blazing 25 mhz! Not to mention the battery life. Boot up at 25mhz, let all the services start, get to doing some real work. Then underclock to 7mhz. In good lighting conditions, even turn the backlight off.

You would be suprized my battery life. Upto 12 hours of constant use. Granted that's at 7mhz. But, realy how fast do you need to run a text editor? 7mhz is more than enough. Plus being able to type just fine without ever realy looking at the screen made the ability to turn the backlight off that much better.

Heh, that thing was quirky though. Being a compaQ, it had the BIOS on the HD. A stupid 5 meg partition at the begining of the drive. It hated lilo with a passion. Then we get to the floppy drive. PCMCIA (or, a PC card, for those of you who arn't old skool enough to know what PCMCIA is). It only worked in linux, if I booted with the drive in the slot. Then, once the cardmgr started, it stoped working. (How else was I going to use my modem?)

That was a long time ago though, it eventualy died a quick, and painless death. Coffee spilled directly on the keyboard. I mourned for days. Finaly, after my grief had subsided a bit, I scavanged all the usefull guts.

Note that I paid just over 1000$ for this notebook.

About a year later, I got another one. Totaly top of the line, over 3000$ price tag on that baby. It was so sweet. 133mhz, 16 megs of ram, and a 1gig HD. Life was good.

That notebook did me well, was very linux friendly, and had a color display! The first day I had it, it was on the floor in every piece possible. Work of my friend sean, and I. It was not that much diffrent on the inside from the aero.

About 2 years later, not long after the warenty ran out it died. The funny thing though, is how it died. I just did.

I take a trip to FL, had like 40 days uptime on it then. Get back, 60 days of uptime. Arive home again, throw it in it's bag. The next morning, I pull it out for use, and it's just dead.

Nothing I did helped any. I did find the culprit though, one chip was very noticabley fried. I could have replaced it, but whould that have been it? I doubt it. I'm shure more than that was a problem. Also, where would I have gotten the spare part?

Now with things like ebay, it would be easy. I can make any hardware basicly live forever. Heh, course it becomes a bit of a question of wheither it's the origional computer anymore after you've replaced most of the parts a couple times.

That's the current situation with this notebook. It works very well, except for the screen. But I am having a hard time finding parts for it. So, in all reality, it's better to just get another one. I'll swap the Hard Drives, that way it will still feel kina like the same computer. Sorta.

In all reality though, it is kina hard to actualy find spare parts for 'off brand' notebooks. Espicaly the age this one is. The only other problem I have, is trying to figure out how to transfer the stickers over to the new one ;)

So far, I'm thinking a razorblade, and glue. Any suggestions? Send them to me at xpurple@xpurple.com.

Well, it's late and I do need to work tommorow (at 1400), I'm going to have a final smoke, and hit the road.

EOF