Sometime around four years ago, I bought the laptop I'm now using to write this blog post. Though since then I've banged it around in my backpack and bike panniers, and though I've reinstalled Linux at least a dozen times since wiping clean the original Ubuntu that it came packaged with, the laptop has served me well. Despite its age, it's still a sleek machine.
However, I recently got a hankering for a 64-bit laptop. I don't know why—it's a desire that just came on. So I started checking out new laptops online—you know, just to get a feel for what's out there. And what I saw is that laptops haven't really improved much in either speed or cost in the last four years. Even quad-cores remain rare. And in particular for me (and my unusual case), there are even fewer Linux laptops available nowadays, which is sad. The hidden Windows fee on new PCs is in the neighborhood of—last I heard—$100. It's satisfying not to send that money to Redmond.
After searching new laptops for a while, I decided it would be smart to check out my current laptop's specs to get an idea of how the new hardware out there compares to what I already have. Even I though I'm often taken for a computer geek, I really had no idea what was actually in my laptop. And cat /proc/cpuinfo is mostly gibberish to me in my hardware ignorance.
So I looked up the specs and saw that I have an Intel Core 2 Duo T5250 processor. And I looked up the specs for that and discovered that it's a 64-bit processor. Did I know four years ago I was buying a 64-bit laptop, but chose to run 32-bit software, and then forgot all about the hardware; or am I just stupid?
Feel free to post comments below, but keep in mind it's a rhetorical question.
2 comments:
I just think the question at the end is funny. It is something I would do (but, not in a computer sense, as I have no clue what bits, bytes, ram, rom, or MB even mean or how they compare). I would totally buy something and forget whether I knew about it's specs and use it in a different way, only to realize and wonder about it later!
So, does this mean the new computer idea is out the window?
If you hadn't guessed, I leave all decisions about hardware, software, firmware, and any other kind of computer-ware up to Josh. :)
Lindsey— Yep, out the window. The computer I have now works well enough for me not to replace it, though its screen has about two dozen dead pixels.
Growing up, Josh and I spent a lot of time playing on computers together. Josh's dad was one of the few adults I knew while growing up that knew much about computers, so for me there was a mystique about the Wilsons' computer. I remember I copied from it a BASIC compiler. That may have been my first experience with a compiler; I can't remember if I got that before or after Turbo C++. … Those were the bad old days, when getting a computer to do anything was like solving an intentionally convoluted puzzle.
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