Ever since I realized computers were awesome I've wanted a laptop. But, through the strange vagaries of having no money or being too young to be employed I never got one...
UNTIL NOW!
And it's as awesome as I'd hoped.
It's an HP OmniBook 900 with a 300mhz pentium II, 160mb RAM and a 6.5gb harddrive. It weighs like three pounds -- it feels like a toy compared to the fatty bricks most of today's laptops are -- I think this was considered a "sub-compact" when it was originally released and it's still tiny by today's standards.
I'm running Linux on it, of course, and with (one of) my favorite minimalistic window managers
wmii.
I spent the morning tuning services and cutting down the size of the base install to give me plenty of room to play with, running a couple xterms with an ssh session back home, a couple tabs in firefox sees and pidgin running and logged on sees a max of 0.80 load. Of course I'm swapping a couple megs here and there, but that's just the way she goes.
This laptop is pretty much all I ever wanted from a computer... and I bought it for $25 worth of gasoline.
Notable feature: this model has the laptop navigation nipple
and a trackpad... each one of these has two nearby mouse buttons so there are two navigation points and four click points on the surface of the laptop. This laptop is about 10"x12"x1" (closed) so it is truly small.
I just need to get a wireless card so I can stop living in the past with this xircom 10/100 dongle flopping about. I wonder if 802.11g would be wasted on a laptop of age such as this... maybe I should just cheap out and get a 802.11b card.