Beginnings

How Does this Begin? “Give Me Some Latitude” is a fan blog for my computer. Its ancestor is still on the web, a page called My Little Crappy Laptop. The basic idea is to spin words on the web in honor of a laptop computer that isn’t exactly the latest and greatest.

My laptop is a Dell Latitude C610, with a Pentium M processor advertised at 1.0 GHz. I bought it at auction on E-bay, when I saw it about to go for $100 less than C600s rated at 900 MHz or lower. I already had a Compaq Presario desktop with an Athlon processor rated at 900 MHz, so I expected I would be getting a laptop that was not much faster than the desktop.

Surprise! The Pentium M processor just about halved the time for the daily virus scan! How many times have you had the computer turned off for some reason, turned it on for some task, and then had to find some other chore that would last the 40 minutes the computer needed to run the virus scan? Or, if using the computer was urgent, and incompatible with the bandwidth needed for your background scan, did you stop the virus scan and “go bare?”

So I had an eBay deal that turned out to be more of a deal than I thought.

Of course, anyone who actually has lived with a Latitude for a while, knows that the story doesn’t end there. Because, you see, the Latitude C610 laptop has a notable flaw which should make it notorious. In the last six months of the life of its warranty, the cursor develops a wanderlust. It will not stay put; in the middle of writing, it jumps up two lines and over 10 spaces, so that you insert your words in material you’ve already written. That was the first sign.

I wasn’t sure the cursor’s behavior at this stage was a match with the postings on the web about wandering cursors and replacement keyboards. It was; gradually, on startup the cursor would go crazy, flipping across the screen usually from lower left to upper right, and sometimes disappearing. I remember developing techniques to bring the cursor behavior under control, that would last for a week or two, and then it became even wilder. Using checklists, like that in gmail, challenged the cursor to its wildest behavior, completely out of control. Now I was fairly sure that this was related to the computer itself, and decided to call Dell on the warranty, which was about to expire. Then I procrastinated, and didn’t call, because a. I didn’t want to lose the use of my fast and ailing laptop, and b. I got hospitalized for one of those runaway bacterial infections.

Out of the hospital again, I had to solve the cursor problem in order to have a usable computer. I did, without calling Dell, without losing (any more) time using the laptop. Now it works fine. I offered the solution to Dell, through their forum on the Latitude, as it would save them the cost of the hundreds of Latitude keyboards they ship out every year.

I did not get a direct response, only a link to “minority contractor” information, which I didn’t understand.

Here I need to explain that the Dell Latitude C610 laptop that I had purchased is not a SOHO computer (Small Office-Home Office). It is usually purchased in bulk by larger businesses, runs either Windows 2000 Professional or Windows XP Professional, and it is IT managers who have to deal with the wandering cursor problem–usually by swapping out an ailing machine and calling Dell for the approved fix of a replacement laptop, which will hold the C610 until the warranty runs out, after which the business replaces it, especially when the same problem recurs. And Dell probably has hundreds or thousands of replacement keyboards on order, depending on when they figure the warranties on the C610 will all run out.

I don’t have a business; I bought the C610 because I am an academic in the Humanities and use the computer all the time for writing and teaching and whatever more I can push any one example to do. For example, my Compaq Presario had a TV board that I used to watch the evening news and work at the same time. The Latitude C610 came with a CD-Rom player, a battery, and a floppy drive; there are just two drive bays, though. So most of the time I have a battery in one bay and the most advanced removable media drive on hand in the other. One could get a DVD-RW drive that would fit the Latitude C610. Checkout Dell’s accessories for the C610 that are still on sale.

I chose instead to get a DVD-CDRW Combo Drive. Why, when the Compaq Presario 5WV271 had just about everything in the way of (five-year-old) media–one CD-RW drive, one DVD-Player drive, a web cam, and stand-alone speakers. And the WinME OS.

The WinME OS had given me some problems and a lot of down time, but in the year before I got the Latitude C610, we had learned to live together fairly amicably. I just didn’t know what stability was; that is, until I experienced the stability of Windows 2000 Professional.

Now I am going to copy the files I need from the Presario onto an external drive, format the Presario’s hard drive, start up with a new operating system, and give the whole thing (except for the web-cam) to a friend who has dyslexia.

He’s quite brainy, and almost completely unable to read. He once picked up the New York Times and told me, “My life would be so happy if I could only read the Times every day.” I said “But I think you can,” and shortly after that found several kinds of screen reading software. The one he learned to use is Please Read, which works with web sites. His life, with his old computer–slow, and destroyed by fire–and a DSL line, became the reader’s paradise that the web can be. The Presario will be faster, and still able to play DVDs.

So I’m circling back to why I need a DVD player for the Latitude–so I can give him the Presario, which had become an overequipped DVD Player–so he can read the New York Times and be happy.

Why the blog? For me, I learn every day from my relationship with the Latitude. Rather like living with a dog or cat, I am taking up new problems weekly. So far, I have been fortunate enough to solve them. Last week’s problem was that the CDRW-DVD Rom drive I acquired would not appear in any listing of hardware. So it took a while to solve that one, also.

Since the problems have been solvable, I’m fairly comfortable telling the world that the Dell Latitude C610 has problems, but these can be fixed. It also has a Pentium-M Central Processing Unit rated at 1.0 GHz. Informal tests available to me indicate the C610 is twice as fast as an Athlon 900. I used the C610 with a T-1 line and downloaded a short about Spider-Man 2 that was said to test whether I could use their Extended Quality movies. The requirement was a Pentium 4 rated at 2.4 GHz. The Dell Latitude C610 handled the task well; the only problem was a little blurring on very fast movement.

Since a 2.4 GHz Pentium is a prerequisite for an external TV card, I am thinking that someday . . .

The next adventure is learning more than a little bit about Windows 2000 Professional. To that end, I have downloaded The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional, by Paul McFedries (unknown city: Que, 2000) from Fictionwise to read with Microsoft Reader®. I also have several books on order from Amazon.com and its affiliates.