The thing that got me going about a laptop was discussing the options with Felix while driving back to Raglan the day after the opening at Pierre’s. Felix suggested a desktop in a travel case and that had me remembering one of the chaps at Fleet FM who was into military spec ‘puters the size of a lunchbox way back in the Odeon cafe days.
Tonight I found Ubuntu studio and while looking into that I’ve now cottoned onto the idea of recording studio software and ever operating system software being able to be loaded from CD’s…
This means that you can load your collection of software, complete with operating system, onto a CD or even USB flash drive, then plug it into any PC and boot from the CD or flash drive… amazing.
Given though that you can pickup laptops from trade me with depleted batteries nice and cheap then the alternative of building a PC could be quite costly, relatively speaking, but the fact remains that HD’s are noisy and power supplies are dirty so the idea of a small box to attach a Small screen, keyboard and mouse to is quite an interesting one as well as the idea that much older PC’s with 1/4 Gb of ram and processor speeds well under 1/2Ghz are really cheap and easy to pickup then these ideas of adding smart drives to them and running from batteries is quite an interesting idea.
This is one mans attempt
This one is way past my abilities but it does bear scrutiny I think. This fellow is able to get right down underneath the OS and do the bios stuff which I kinda wish I’d got into all those years ago, but I didn’t, but it shouldn’t be too hard to build something using an old computer then attaching a smart drive box and having the ‘puter boot from it.
What I find intensely interesting is that while these things may be completely beyond most peoples abilities to put together themselves it also means that whats done in the shed this year will most probably be on the shelves at Harvey Normans next year… or the year after!
Oh, I am so behind the times….
This post is dated 2007!
But it’s also still available as a kitset.
This ones available from a company in Canada, and Mums going there in a coupla months.