A changing of the guard

Well, yesterday was quite the experience. I had to say goodbye to one of my closest and dearest friends - my laptop. It stuck by me for a long time, and it did a wonderful job in all it did. I had gone to turn it on Sunday night to play a game of the Battle for Wesnoth(a turn-based strategy game, quite fun), and as the laptop powered on, I noticed something odd... The screen would not turn on. I had a blank screen. I power cycled it again, to see if it was just a fluke thing, and it wasn't. I had no visual on the LCD. Monday, in a fit of experimentation, I decided to hook it up to the monitor to see if I could switch displays, and get it to work like that. The monitor came up fine, and when I hit FN+F5 to switch displays, the LCD came up again! Monday and Tuesday I left the system running, just to make sure nothing was going to die again. I finally turned it off yesterday, to see whether or not it was going to happen again, and it did. No screen. I tried hooking it back up to the monitor, and this time, the monitor worked, but switching the display did nothing. So I have a working laptop without an LCD screen, that will work when plugged in. That would be fine, except that I leave for japan in three weeks (Exact date: March 28th, 6AM). So, I called Toshiba tech support, to see what they could do. Turns out, I'm over my warranty. They gave me a referral to a company to try out and see what they could do. I talked to them about it; to take it in to be looked at is a flat rate of $100. In order to replace the screen, it was $650. Grand total, plus labor: around $800. To which I thought, "that's more than the laptop is worth, and I could probably get a new one for that much.

And that is what I did. Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to intoduce you to: Kyoya.



Allow me to go into geek mode, for just a bit. Kyoya (named after the character seen here is an Acer Aspire 5610Z, which includes:
Intel Dual Core T2060 (Before the Core Duo series) @ 1.6Ghz apiece
80 GiB HDD
1 GiB RAM
DVD+ and DVD-RW, including dual layer
Intel GMA 950 integrated graphics (not bad, especially for my use)
Integrated WLAN (Atheros-based chipset)

Not too shabby. And, I picked it up for $150 less than what I would have paid for repairing my other system: $643.49, after sales tax.

Kyoya came with Windows Vista Home Premium preinstalled. I left it on there for the novelty. :) The real story came when I threw in my Sabayon Linux 3.2 LiveDVD to install Sabayon to my HDD. I think there's one thing that hasn't worked out of the box, out of the entire system. PCMCIA registered fine, Sound, Video (with help from 915resolution), AIGLX/Beryl working beautifully, and it suspends to RAM and disk! The only thing that wasn't working at this time, with no configuration, was the LCD does not change on an ACPI call. In other words, when you unplug it, the screen doesn't dim, and vice versa.

I was worried that I might not have a laptop to bring with me on my trip, but I'm glad I made this choice. Things couldn't be running better.

Have a good day everyone!