Robert Jr. was another Compaq—model number 7370DMT. I looked him up, and this is a laptop that cost over $4000 in 1998, yet which I picked up (in August 2001) for a mere $350. He was a P1 233/MMX with 96M of RAM (woohoo RAM upgrades!) and a 4G hard drive. His screen did 1024x768 natively; the display hardware handled a maximum bit depth of 16 at that resolution. His keyboard was the envy of—well, me—oh wait, he's mine. Anyway, the keyboard was excellent. The pointing device was one of those annoying nipple things, which since trying out I've learned isn't actually that annoying, though I had an external trackball for when it does bother me. Unfortunately, it eventually became extremely flaky, and this seems to have been a model-line defect rather than an isolated incident, since the second “shell” I got for Robert Jr. had the same problem.
Robert Jr. ran Windows 98SE (which he came with). He had a copy of Office 2000 installed, which may come in handy some day saved my ass a few times. The most interesting piece of software on him, though (actually many pieces), was undoubtedly Cygwin. Cygwin is a set of tools that almost let you pretend a Windows computer is just another version of *nix. The amount of stuff in this is ridiculous—I mean, rxvt (a terminal emulator) is ported. Lots of *nix software will compile and run out-of-box on it, too. If you like *nix, but have to use Windows for any reason, I highly encourage you to check Cygwin out.
Other than that, he ran Opera for web browsing. I used PuTTY for all my terminal emulating (which is a lot, since I'm a Unix freak) and VNC when I wanted to get access to Laura's desktop remotely (wirelessly, even!) Oh, and since he had sound (Robert Sr. didn't), I could actually use Winamp on him, and listen to music! Yay! And SNES and NES emulators both ran quite well on him (Nesticle and ZSNES currently), as does the image viewer IrfanView.
See Robert for information about Robert Jr.'s colineants.
Kenn Hamm
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Last modified: Wed Dec 10 18:05:29 2003