firing one...

Thursday, April 08, 2004, at 11:56AM

By Eric Richardson

Still sitting in the library. Someone at the next table just booted up his laptop and I can hear the fan from here. I can hear it ramp up the speed at times, too. That's crazy. I'm ten feet from his machine, and I can hear it loud and clear. My laptop's sitting right in front of me, and I can't hear it at all.

Oh yeah, that's because my fan's off. It can do that because my cpu's just chillin' at 54 degrees C, my power draw's low at 1.2A, and my drive's been spun down for a while now.

I can't really understand why so many people carry around what are basically luggable desktops. His machine must weigh 10 lbs. And what's he going to use it for? To write a paper? To browse the internet? Oooh... That's heavy-duty.