laptop

Just in case you haven't heard, Dell recently announced a new range of laptops that should be shipping before the end of the year. One exciting new feature is "Latitude On". What is that? Have you heard of Splashtop? If not, check out this video. Latitude is similar BUT unlike Splashtop which is software only, Latitude On includes a hardware subsystem so it uses its own CPU and other resources separate from the main CPU and OS on the system. The advantage is that Latitude On will use way less power... and will supposedly have a battery life of days. Dell didn't make the distro they are embedding but they won't yet say who did. Here's a video from the press conference Dell gave.

I somehow got "voluntwisted" into fixing a coworkers Sony laptop. Well okay maybe it was my own doing. I love to recover data from presumed dead hard drives. His had been dead and powered up for so long, I presumed it was toast like so many laptop drives usually are. Much to my surprise it was mountable using an old Live Knoppix disk. So I simply plugged in my USB drive and with MC I did mass copies to it. Since it was a bad disk it did take about 8 hours to move about 2GB of data (music and pictures).

So next the coworker produced a replacement drive. One dilemma though... he didn't have his recovery CD's since he just moved here and having a tough time finding anything really. So I thought I'd try using my home Dell PC. OEM CD's tend to require you to use their own hardware to do the installs so my XP Home disk would have to be installed using my PC. Ordered a laptop to IDE converter from RadioShack online; as they don't carry them in the stores. All is well. Got that installed and next I plopped it back in the Sony. No go. CRAP! It's an AMD. I used an Intel PC not to mention possible disk parameter differences. Back to the drawing board.