Good things

Dell tell me that my new laptop has been made to order, and it is in the "preparation for delivery" stage. Hopefully that means I will have it in a couple of days. Given the state of non-working of my existing laptop, this will be a huge relief. I have bought a machine with inbuilt wireless, so I will have to go around hunting in London for wireless hotspots, I suppose. I paid an extra £10 for 802.11b/g wireless rather than just plain 802.11b. I could have paid a bit more for 802.11a/b/g. I suppose I will find out in a couple of years time whether 802.11a takeup occurs in a big way and whether I should have made the additional investment. Of course, if it becomes an enormous deal, I will still be able to add an additional 802.11a card, so it is not like I have restricted myself very much.

And of course my last laptop lasted me for two years. Even if it was still properly functional, it was getting to the point where its featureset was not up to my requirements. We will see how long this one lasts.

Update: It has now shipped from Dell's European manufacturing facility, which is probably in Ireland. I wonder how long it will now take. For people who are wondering, my financial resources turned out to be greater than I expected, so I am getting a Pentium M 1.4GHz system with a 60 GByte hard drive, a 1920x1200 15.4" screen, a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive, 512 Mbytes of RAM, onboard 802.11b/g, and a few other things.