Jack of Harts

I have an old Dell Latitude E series 6410 that has been my primary laptop for years. It came to me from a corporate dumpster and I got it for little more than a song and a lapdance, and have used her ever since.

Now the 6410s were designed to be corporate heavy duty laptops, with the ability to interface both with old corporate legacy gear and the best of the new hotness that was coming out at the time. They sport old parallel, serial, VGA and PS2 ports next to DisplayPorts, USB, eSATA, and Firewire ports. And mine at least came with one of the most powerful processor cores then available on laptops. The core i7. She’s a duel-core machine that came out in an era where quad-cores were becoming common on desktops, but laptops couldn’t run quad-cores. They didn’t have the power to do that, so they cheated and split each core into being able to run two threads and swap processor resources back and forth between them. It gave them four effective cores that are still able to operate today as a near quad-core. They were engineered to be easily maintained and fixed. I’ve replaced her hard drives twice, her keyboard at least twice, and I’ve lost count of how many batteries I’ve replaced over the years. I’ve upgraded her memory to the absolute best and fastest she can support, given her an expresscard that installs usb 3 ports, and I run her at maximum performance settings to make sure she keeps in tip top shape.

She was built over 15 years ago, and went to work in corporate offices. She and her kin worked in every industry, from medical to science to accounting and beyond, and they were designed to run and be safe in the most secure of top secret environments. And to be easy to repair if something broke. Most of her kin were retired 5 to 10 years ago, and were either junked or parted out or found their way into private hands that have been lovingly keeping them operational ever since. Lightweight games, web browsing, running servers, or just writing like I do on mine.

Well, I work at a corporation that uses the Island corporate web browser to access confidential data. It is a new browser, about 3 years old, designed for large companies, and includes heavy encryption and a great deal of other security measures to make certain that confidential data is not misplaced. And encryption that strong is not always light on the resources it requires of a computer to operate it. I’ve taken my laptop to work for years, and done a great deal of work work on it while doing so. And now my laptop is running Island so I can log into the workplace environment from the backroom without having to walk all the way up to the front desk. 15 years after she was built, 5 to 10 years after she and her sisters were retired from corporate fleets, she’s still able to log into a 3-year old ultra secure operating environment. And she does it without choking on the data flow.

And the real amazing thing? She still works as well as most budget laptops you can buy right now. I have to get into the 500 to 1000 dollar range of mid to high-performance octo-core and above laptops before they have a clear advantage over her. She’s no gaming machine, but she is a solid workhorse that continues to be useful, even in a corporate environment, 15 years after she came off the line. That’s awesome.

Minnesnowta is living up to its name today. And I am living up to my Northern Minnesnowta roots.

I of course shoveled snow in my tanktop because I didn’t want to get hot.

And you now have that image in your mind.

Your welcome. 🙂

I hope you all had a good Christmas. A Merry Christmas.

I hope you got the gifts you were looking for.

I… sadly… did not get the bad girls list. Santa is holding out on me.

Other than that, I had a good Christmas and went shopping today for some strap brackets for my jacket and found three Transformers toys on after-Christmas clearance.

Yes, I went to the store for crafting materials and came home with Transformers. Don’t judge me.

It was a good day, and I’m looking forward to the new year…