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20050610 Friday June 10, 2005

New Ferrari Owner

Like several other Sun bloggers before me, I'm now the proud owner of a brand new Ferrari. An Acer Ferrari 3400 laptop that is. My manager has kindly allowed me to get this to replace the five year old Toshiba Protege I had, which quite frankly, just can't keep up with the resource requirements of our modern day operating systems.

This is a really nifty laptop. It comes with Windows XP and has the sound of a racing car (presumably a Ferrari) as the Windows startup sound. Cute the first time you hear it but wearing every time after that. Easy to get rid of though (I wonder how many Ferrari owners who are still using Windows XP, still have this enabled).

It has a bright red case and the Ferrari badge. Quoting the Acer marketing blurb:

Sporting the coveted Prancing Horse emblem and swathed in gleaming Ferrari-red, the Ferrari 3400 embodies what image-conscious professionals desire.

Renowned for high quality standards and leadership in the industry, the Ferrari 3400 symbolises Acer's excellence in state-of-the-art engineering and design.

Yup, overall I'd agree with this. One thing that is slightly disconcerting though is when the after burners fans kick in, when it's "thinking hard". Perhaps Acer can find out where Apple gets its fans for its laptops from, and use them in the next version.

Over the last couple of days, I've setup the laptop to have a triple boot:

There was a certain FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) involved with this, but now was the perfect time to get over this as there was no data on the laptop disk that I wanted to keep.

I offer my thanks to the following people, who helped me get this setup, patiently answering all the questions I had:

I've learnt more about disk partitioning and boot loaders in the last two days than I really wanted to know, but it's all good education (I've taken notes so I'll still retain this information even after my brain throws it out, and the next time will hopefully be trivial).

Now I wonder if I can get Sun to agree to buy a matching company car...

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( Jun 10 2005, 08:51:54 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [8]

Comments:

Now just to install Mac OS X on it as well... when they release the x86 version.

Posted by Dan Lacher on June 10, 2005 at 10:07 AM PDT #

But wouldn't that be illegal Dan? ;-)

Posted by Rich Burridge on June 10, 2005 at 10:29 AM PDT #

Can you post your partitioning notes (about triple booting). That would be very very helpful.

Posted by Loyal reader on June 10, 2005 at 10:41 AM PDT #

Hi Loyal Reader. I've just done a separate post for this. You can find it here. Let me know if you have any other questions (while it's fresh in my memory. ;-)

Posted by Rich Burridge on June 10, 2005 at 11:25 AM PDT #

Not sure what you mean about apple. My 15" powerbook has a fan loud as a 767 taking off.

Posted by Jakub Steiner on June 10, 2005 at 02:08 PM PDT #

Hi Jakub. Interesting. My 15" PB's fan is whisper quiet. Same with the fan in my wifes iBook. Perhaps yours needs replacing...

Posted by Rich Burridge on June 10, 2005 at 02:11 PM PDT #

Two words: Rob Enderle

Posted by None on June 10, 2005 at 03:42 PM PDT #

None, you're going to have to give me more than two words, unless you mean something like this.

Posted by Rich Burridge on June 10, 2005 at 04:28 PM PDT #

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