Last summer, I bought a used Dell Inspiron laptop from where I work. The intention was to upgrade my laptop situation in the shack. I have been using an old Toshiba Satellite laptop; which I had also bought used, for a song. While the price was minimal, I was reminded that you get what you pay for. I should have known I was in for a less than optimum experience as the previous owner had a sticker of a picture of a snail stuck on the top half of the computer, near the screen. Shortly after I purchased the Toshiba, the sound card failed so I couldn't even use the computer for the digital modes.
The Dell was a step up; but I screwed it up totally, right after buying it. I thought I had turned the computer off and I folded it up and put it in it's case, to bring it home. When I got it home, I realized that the computer had been left on and it was very, very, very hot! Trying to turn it back on again yielded nothing. I must had damaged the power connection on the motherboard as the computer wouldn't even run off the AC adapter. This was definitely a Homer Simpson moment.
A few weeks ago, I put the computer on eBay for parts; and I sold it "as is". I got a goodly amount for it, much to my surprise. In turn, I scoured eBay and bought a Dell Latitude, which is a lesser model. I ended up getting it for about 10 bucks less than what I sold the Inspiron for. It's not as fancy as the Inspiron; but it works and it has a working sound card. Now one of these days, when I actually get some time, I will load up Spectrogram and will finally really nail the alignment of my K2's filters.
The computer has a 10 Gigabyte hard drive. It's running Windows 2000, which has chewed up a large chunk of that hard drive; but there is more than 5 Gigabytes left. For the few Amateur Radio programs that I will be putting on there, that's more than enough space. It came with a detachable floppy and a CD ROM drive. All in all, it's a good little laptop and will serve my purposes well.
73 de Larry W2LJ
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