Tech Report 1

The grant checks were picked up this evening, so the laptop has been ordered. We were looking at a $600 Gateway that was on sale through BestBuy, but with tax and shipping the price was climbing and the team reiterated their desire to do this with the cheapest machine that would get the job done. In light of that stipulation, I ordered a Toshiba Satellite from OfficeDepot for $650 with tax, minus $150 rebate, so it's a $500 notebook - just what they wanted to spend. It's a Celeron M processor instead of Dual Core Pentiums, 512MB of RAM instead of 1GB, 80GB HD instead of 120GB, and a 15.4" screen instead of the lighter 14.1". As much as all of that pains me, it's still more machine than this P3, 256MB, 30GB 5-year old Vaio that cost 3 times that much, and this machine would do everything necessary, except it has a bad habit of freezing up and could die any day. Plus, the savings covers most of the cost of the digital camera I'm trying to get them to buy. I've been fiddling around with a $20 refurbished Aiptek I bought as an experiment - the grainy video on this site comes from that machine. Its big brother will do a considerably better job and these things take up no room and are very easy to use, so I hope they go for it. In the meantime, we'll pick up the new notebook tomorrow and we'll work to strip the bloatware off and get it running smoothly.