Calling Home
I’m thinking of bringing my computer with me. I’m a little nervous about bringing my main computer, though, since it’s got a lot of valuable stuff on it, and since it’s valuable itself. So I’m toying with bringing my old laptop, which currently has a decrepit installation of XP Home. I could just put Ubuntu on it and have a simple, lightweight OS.
I think it could prove useful for the following reasons:
- I want to bring my camera, and I’ll probably be shooting a lot. I have an aggregate 1.5 GB of xD cards, but, in all seriousness, it’s probably not enough.
- I’d like to post some photos and keep this blog updated, from Ghana. Apparently several of the hotels have WiFi, so both of these are possible solutions.
- I still have €11.87 in SkypeOut credits. (Yes, 11.87 Euro.) Skype doesn’t care where I’m calling from, only where I’m calling to. And on SkypeOut, all of America* is only 1.7 (Euro) cents a minute. This works out to 698 minutes remaining. So I’d have plenty of time to call home and chat.
* And Canada, most of Western Europe, China, Australia, and a few others.
n1zyy on 04 Aug 2007 at 12:00 am #
I gave serious thought to just keeping XP Home on it, but spent a few minutes in it trying to pull some data off and quickly changed my mind. It’s slow as molasses, although some of it’s my own fault. (For example, four years ago, when it was my main machine, I didn’t realize that Windows would slow down with 2,000 fonts installed.)
But I also need to install SP2, which has downloaded, and find drivers for my wireless card. I need to remove gigs and gigs of stuff that’s no longer needed, and update almost every piece of software on the machine.
So, alas, once I find a blank CD and back up a few bits of important data, Windows is gone.
Mr. T on 07 Aug 2007 at 7:27 pm #
Skype computer to computer is still free though right? I used it to call someone in Australia last week. That was pretty cool actually.