Only two more to go.
In other news, my Averatec laptop almost broke again today when I had it on my lap and it almost fell off. I caught it last-second, but this damn laptop is so small that sometimes I don’t even realize how close it is to being off the edge of my lap!
The thing has been working better and better. I got a program called fvcool which can send the Averatec into “low-power mode”, which means that the CPU gets sent HLT instructions and “powersave signals” on idle. The result is that it runs a lot cooler and saves more battery power, but at the expense of “real-time” apps like movie playing and even some MP3 playing, so you can’t have it on all the time.
The only bad thing about this laptop is sadly a trivial thing: the paint job. We all know laptops (except the TiBook/AlBook) are made of plastic under the shiny silver finish, but we wish that that silver finish would never come off. However, Averatec apparently used cheap paint, and so there are “palm prints” under where my palms have rested near the keyboard, as well as already a couple of spots (on the corners of my laptop) where the paint has rubbed off just from getting in contact with things. Kinda sad, because high-quality paint isn’t exactly expensive. Regardless, I’ll just have to paint it myself (or have M help me)… it might be a bit of an ordeal, but I think it’s possible to do. I’d just have to figure out a smart way to cover the LCD, keyboard and touch pad… maybe I can get M’s help when I come to that juncture.
Maybe I’ll switch this laptop’s color to something a little less “blah” than silver–a really shiny black would be awesome, I think.
In addition, I fixed some of my nasty X issues, so now my machine doesn’t hard lock ever. So that’s good too.
Now I gotta get studying for Basic Algorithms… fun fun.