Sunday, January 07, 2007

Santa's gift.

I normally do not believe in Santa. Of course he might not believe in me too. But this year I do, I do! As luck would have it, my old laptop stopped working completely the week immediately after Thanksgiving. Its timing was derisively perfect. All the $300 laptops in America were now sold out, and I had a brand new paper weight to show off.

Then followed a month of frantically tearing my hair apart, with sleepless nights of toil to get the paper weight to be more useful.... all it said was 'no can do'. I guess it needed the Christmas break too, just like I. So I just let it be, and wished my nights away for a miracle to happen. Christmas was so close. It was not too unreasonable to expect a miracle. After all this country runs on that stuff.


My friend asked me one fine day if I needed a laptop. I thought he was nuts. The look I gave him definitely showed that. He said his roommate was moving, and wanted to throw his laptop away. (More of this species, God!)
For the moment I will call the roomie as Santa. So Santa gives me this pretty sturdy Dell Latitude with a Pentium 3 and 256Megs of RAM. Complete with a case and all. Ofcourse it has Windows XP working(!) on it with a blue screen here and there for variety. I stripped it down the very night, and installed DSL, the OS made for my machine.

Ok. enough said. Here you go.

A fresh boot consumes 30 MB of RAM. The GUI comes bundled with Firefox, Acrobat, Spreadsheet, Word processor, and a ton of other goodies, all stuffed in a 50 MB ISO.

Oh.., and thank you Santa :) Merry Christmas, and a Happy new year! Ho ho ho!