Swoosh
Celeron 1.5ghz, 256mb sdram, 20gb hd. That’s Swoosh. My trusty laptop.
Nothing fancy here - no wi-fi, firewire, card readers or cd-rom write capability. Packing the usual 10/100, 56k modem, monitor output, a pc card slot and four 1.1 usb ports, i’d say i like that configuration. It’s your generic grunt that gets the job done.
The lack of unnecessary devices allowed me to drop Windows processes down to less than 30 while running my web development suite (a glorified term for wamp + dreamweaver). That makes things a lot faster than say, when you’re running 50 processes or so to support your additional devices.
Wi-fi could have been good but i’ve got DSL at home and the slowly but surely computer labs at ateneo for the interweb. If you plan very well, you really don’t need wi-fi at ateneo - you just want it. Lolz. But this isn’t a rant against wi-fi, justification for having no wi-fi or a troll against ateneo wi-fi. hell, they’re all good things in many occassions. There was just nothing to do over the net while i was at ateneo (well, except for fegame, perhaps) so i really didn’t feel the need for it - even if the Php1,500 (US$30) cards were dropping their panties for me to buy them.
When it comes to games, Swoosh did well, allowing me to play:
- Diablo series
- Ragnarok Online
- WC3 ~ DoTA
- console-emulated games
- Fallout series
- Baldur’s Gate series
- Arcanum
hehe. and that’s a lot - all i’ve ever needed to play, actually.
When it comes to applications, Swoosh ran my office productivity software properly. The only programs i remembered having a hard time with it was my J2EE IDEs. Took me back to my 80486dx4-16mb ram days.
There was also a time when i was running Linux on it. Fedora Core and Ubuntu worked like a charm, detecting every piece of hardware and running them perfeclty. Would have wanted Damn Small Linux for a liveCD but there was a keyboard bug that couldn’t map my keys properly. And oh, booting from the USB wasn’t an option either, the BIOS didn’t support it.
Swoosh still works perfectly well. Besides the dead battery and malfunctioning CD-ROM, everything is as good as the day I got it.
This tribute is due to the arrival of Zoom, a Compaq v2000t [more on this later], who is giving Swoosh a chance to explore other roles in my laboratory (a server for mail / backup / router / etc). Well, well, this is going to be very exciting! So tag along as I Serve in Silence