It all started when I was looking at some old Fellowship pictures on NDN from probably four or five years ago and noticed the laptop I was using was in the photos.

It dawned on me that the old Toshiba was getting some years on it, so I started to look around.

I didn't want to spend a fortune, and lately I've had a lot of luck buying refirbished equipment.

Usually, the way this works is someone buys a computer and doesn't know how it works, so they return it to the store. Most of the time there really isn't anything wrong with it. But, they can't sell it as new anymore, so they will sell them to an outfit like Tiger Direct. They have a technician go through them and fix whatever might be wrong, then they get sold for a fraction of the price.

I really hate changing computers. I have two main ones. The one at home in the den, and the laptop I travel with. I spend years customizing these machines and getting them to work the way I want. So, I tend to hold on to them until long after they are obsolete. I have a lot invested in Software that I can't always figure out where it came from... stuff like that.

So, I went on Tiger Direct and found them selling Dell C640's for $599. This is a 2 GHz laptop with Windows XP Pro, and a variety of bells and whistles. I liked it too because it is highly customizable, with a swappable bay that you can put anything from a floppy drive to a DVD RW, to a second battery in. It also has a compartment where you can install an internal WiFi card instead of taking up one of the two external card slots.

Before just buying the thing, I went over to Ebay to see if anybody over there had any for sale, and what they were going for.

I found a guy who had a bunch of them just off a corporate lease. I put in a bid and got it for $450.00. He guaranteed it for 30 days, and offered to swap out with another in his stack if I got one that had a problem.

It came yesterday. I had already bought 1 gig of RAM for it off another Ebay auction. That memory was used, and I got it for next to nothing. I've also bought off various auctions the internal WiFi card, a DVD RW drive for the swap bay, and various other toys. By the time I'm done, I'll still have less than half the money into it that my old laptop cost.

The thing really screams. From the time you hit the switch until XP is ready to use is about 45 seconds. My old machine probably takes ten minutes or more before things stop rattling and loading.

I'm also finally getting familiar with XP. I've been using Win2000 on both machines, and figured I'd get my feet wet when I bought a machine that had it pre-installed.

Once I get up to speed, perhaps I can be more helpful with these XP questions in here.