New laptop

I was at daughter.1 this weekend, and I took with me my faithful old Dell, so I could do some stuff. I've had it for about 10 years, and it's been great for while I'm away from home, for accessing the internet, doing email, and doing small maintenance jobs.

But it only has 1gb of memory and a 600 mhz processor, so the version of Linux I have on it is Fedora 9, which is 10 years old. Linux is still working, the Dell still works, but it's a lot less useful than it used to be. It does the main thing I need, which is to run ssh, so I can log in to my servers.

The main problem is that I can't update the browser, which means that it doesn't have the modern encryption systems, which means there's web sites I can't access - including my own. Because SSL is now deprecated, and we're all supposed to use TLS. Plus, it's very slow (although I think that a lot of this is daughter.1's slow broadband internet connection, which seems to be around 1.7 mbit, although this was a Sunday, so maybe it's a contention issue).

I have another Dell, but that's not much better; it has 1.5 gb memory. The most recent Fedora it will take is version 16 (the current version is 27).

More recently, I bought a Lenovo thinkpad. That has 4gb of memory, and is running Fedora 27. But I want one laptop in Victoria, at daughter.1's place, and one for going away with. So I decided that I needed another laptop. Time to visit Ebay.

I looked for 8gb memory, because I think that's one of the main factors affecting performance. And I also wanted a high resolution screen. 1920 by 1600 at least, and even better would be nice.

I found this.  8gb memory, 2560x1440 screen, 2.9 ghz processor. So it should be nice and fast. It comes with Windows 10 Home or Pro, I chose Home because it's cheaper, and I'm planning to put Linux on it anyway. If you're interested, the seller has many more for sale.  It cost me £299, which is a great price, but there are a couple of negatives.

1) No DVD drive. I've bought an external one for £8.
2) No ethernet. But I'm expecting to only use Wifi.
3) The screen is 14 inches, not large.

So I thought about, maybe get an external screen? See next post.