A tech investment.

Since my poor, rather senile laptop has finally become incapable of typing vowels (I use a separate keyboard now), and since its burner doesn't work and its pitiful 30 GB hard drive is stuffed to a breaking point with music and graphics programs, I've decided it's time to invest in a new notebook. Or rather, a refurbished notebook. From (dun dun dunnn) Dell.
I know it's dangerous to order from Dell, and that its service generally sucks, etc., etc.; and I know that Macs are the way to go now, if you're dastardly-rich enough to afford them, anyway--which I am not. Nevertheless, I've had a good personal history will Dell: Irmabelle (my old Dell Inspiron 2650) made it through graphic design school, gaming geekery, and gigabytes upon gigabytes of music madness before finally leaving on longterm mental vacation. May the next one manage to do the same.

This is the model I ordered, very basic:

Inspiron 640m/E1405 Notebook
Intel Pentium dual-core T2080(1MB Cache/1.73GHz/533MHz FSB)
80 GB EIDE SATA Hard Drive (5400 RPM)
1 GB DDR2 SDRAM 533MHz (2 DIMMs)
9 Cell Primary Battery
14.1 inch WXGA Notebook Screen (probably should have upgraded, hmm...)
24X CD RW/DVD Combo Drive
Internal NIC/56K Modem
Intel Integrated Graphics Media Accelerator 950
Windows Vista Home Basic (but I think I'll run XP because of RAM limitations)
1390 Wireless Card

It was about all that I could do on my budget, and I think it'll be fine. The fact is that after using Irmabelle regularly for the past two (precarious) years, anything newer will seem heavenly and will most likely run what I need it to. I made sure that it comes with a warranty, in case it decides to crap out.
It was odd buying a computer without the input of gamer/programmer friends. Now I mostly hang with lit geeks and teacher-people and karate masters, and am quite disconnected from techie things. I probably just bought a rock with a Duracell battery taped to its side, but that's still a step up from Irma.

I am considering sending Irmabelle to a computers-for-schools program, but am uncertain they'd take her, due to keyboard problems.