bitter magnet

so last month, my laptop (a Dell Inspiron 700M) was stolen from my office at MIT. 先月、ラップトップが盗まれました。困ったなあ。Yeah, I was pissed because I even had one of those Kensington-type locks on it, but I guess that didn't stop the thief (apparently they just yanked it so hard that they broke the computer case, as evidenced by pieces of laptop case left behind on my desk). Anyway, I was shocked too, especially since it happened on a Monday around 9 am (wasn't the dead of night or anything). But of course I had made the dumb mistake of leaving my door unlocked, since I had just stepped out of the office for 10 minutes (doh!). I guess the laptop lock had given me a false sense of security.

Anyway, it royally sucked and basically I spent the rest of the day on the phone with the MIT Police or the MIT Property office (the laptop wasn't really mine, it was MIT Property, so I needed to file a report). Anyway, in the end the MIT account it was purchased by ended up getting a decent amount of money back from the insurance claim, so at least there was that.

Well soon after the laptop got stolen, I got an old Dell latitude laptop from the Weblab group to use. Initially it worked quite well, but after installing the necessary programs and everything (MS Office, Matlab, Google Desktop, etc), it's been getting a bit cumbersome to use. For instance, the hard drive is only 20 GB, so there isn't enough space for my music files or pictures..I had to put them on a separate drive at home. Also, it's become notably slow (it's a 850 MHz or something) so it takes forever to browse some websites or search for files. And it only had one working USB port (the other is actually broken, I found out), which is USB 1.0 so it takes FOREVER to transfer stuff to a USB drive or to download from a camera. Another thing is that it's quite large and heavy (even without the power supply, I'm guessing about 8 pounds). Sometimes I leave it in the office, since I don't want to break my back lugging it home.


So earlier I was browsing the Dell website to maybe purchase my own laptop as a replacement. However, nothing really jumps out (there are all kinds of sales and such, but when you actually build it up to be a decent machine, it comes out to relatively hefty price). Plus, it'd be a royal bitch to transfer all my files AGAIN and re-install everything.... どうしようかなあ。

# posted by anita @ 3:48 PM