I’ve been meaning to get a laptop for a while.  One might say that I don’t need another laptop.  After all, I do have five already.

Of course, all five of these have bad hard drives.  The newest one is seven years old.  One has a blown motherboard.  One lacks a power supply.  One has a dead keyboard.

So maybe it’s time for a new one.

Newegg.com had a sale on one I couldn’t resist — a Gateway T-6345U Pentium T3400 2.16GHz dual core system with 2GB of RAM and 250 GB hard drive for $399 (normally $549).  Since it’s pretty much the same spec as an $800 machine I was considering, it was a no-brainer.  I’ve always thought you had to have no brains to buy Gateway, so in this case it was a done deal.

Believe it or not, the hardware doesn’t actually suck.  You get a lot for 400 bucks.

It shipped with Vista Home Premium.  Resizing the partition to make room for Ubuntu Linux was a bit of a pain — I couldn’t squeeze more than 110GB out of the Vista partiton in the resize, and that was with page files and snapshots turned off and a good solid defrag.  And, of course, after all that ridiculous junk that gets bundled with a new PC was removed.  Why do they even try to sell people Earthlink dialup?

After trying to install Ubuntu 8.04 and totally botching the partition job (it boots, but can’t login because home directories can’t exist — Whoops!), I’ve thrown in the towel on 8.04 and will be installing 9.04 after it finishes downloading (at a blazing 25kb a second — why do I have this 4 meg high-speed connection again?)

Eventually I’ll have the sucker set up for dual booting Vista and Ubuntu and not long after that, set up for developing Basternae 3 and all of the other web miscellany that I’ve been working on (Django, ASP.NET MVC, etc.)