I’m intending to continue this blog as a long-term test. As I have mentioned before, this is not my laptop, but my son’s. For this reason I shall not be messing around with the computer as much as usual because it needs to stay working!
The software in terms of educational and games packages is quite limited. Fortunately my son seems quite content in creating works of art in the ‘paint’ programme, and learning to write words on the keyboard in Abiword. Aside from this, there isn’t much on the standard install that he is interested in.
I have installed xgalaga and Rick Dangerous from the littlelinuxlaptop.com site. This site seems to get updated quite regularly and is a good resource. I’ve spent quite some time improving my xgalaga high score but just get splatted on Rick Dangerous.
In terms of robustness, I’m anticipating that this machine will have quite a hard life in the hands of my son, in fact, one of the motivators for doing this blog was a suggestion by some friends to document how the laptop fared! He has been very careful with the laptop and is quite chuffed to have been given it. However, disaster struck when we were on holiday a few weeks ago….the laptop had been carefully placed by him on the back seat of the car, but when I braked, it slid forward and fell to the floor. My wife retrieved it and gave it back to him, but I was curious as to why my son was asking “why had my laptop got a hole in it?”. When we stopped, I found that there was a dent in the side of the screen bezel and the plastic clip over the screen hinge had popped off (hence the ‘hole’). The boot process seemed painfully slow (a black screen for a long, long time!), but the laptop lives on apparently unaffected. I guess that’s the warranty out of the window!
I’ve bought him a generic mouse off ebay and a nice cheap 4gb SD card from play.com and he enjoys having stuff to plug into it.
It’s yet to be connected to the internet, so we’ll see how we get on with that later.
