How I wish it were true. A long-lasting, user-serviceable laptop would have saved me a good lot of time and money. Given the poor structual quality of my laptop, I wouldn't be surprised if it was tailor-made to break in two years, in hopes that the user would spend more money on yet another laptop.

Legacy ports are now being phased out all around, including on desktops. The closest I got to buying a legacy-enabled laptop was the Dell Latitude D610, though its lack of hardware-accelerated anything, in addition to the fact that it was a Dell, steered me away. Instead of maintaining compliance with old PC standards, which tell that you can work a printer by shoving raw data down a parallel line without special drivers, everybody moved to USB as a cure-all. The result is that your page prints two seconds faster. I'd rather have the compatibility.

Legacy ports and fast window managers aren't the only thing we've lost. In recent years, as part of an effort to design cheaper systems, the hardware inside computers have been disappearing as well. The first to go were modems, where the "Winmodem" took its place. A Winmodem isn't even a modem to begin with -- it's a device that tells your sound card how to emulate a modem and interface with a phone line. Better yet, then sound cards disappeared, leaving sound to be emulated on the CPU. What happens when you run an emulated modem on an emulated sound card? It isn't pretty.

Thankfully, there are still a few fast window managers for Linux. Depending on how minimalistic a window manager you can usably work with, you could try either XFce or Fluxbox. Don't expect to find NT 4.0 running on any modern-age computer, though: it crashes on bootup in three different tests on new PCs.
Don_HH2K | 07.03.06 - 7:54 am | #