I had some problems with Val’s laptop when I took it from Suse Linux to WindowsXP. She actually seemed to be happier using it when I had Suse on it instead of Windows. So I downloaded Suse 9.3 and started working towards getting her away from Windows once again.

During this process I got bored and decided to bid on older, used iBooks on eBay. I kept losing bid after bid because I think I was just being to cheap for iBooks that were really not that old. So, I thought I would try a few of the older iBooks that came in “flavors” and had a handle to give it that true “Hello Kitty purse” look.

I had lost all of the iBooks that I bid on and only had one auction left to lose, so I figured I would wake up to find another eBay “you have been outbid” email. Surprisingly I won. Great. Now what? Val will kill me. No way will she be OK with me spending money on another computer! But maybe this won’t be so bad. It only cost me $182.50. She’ll still be upset but I have learned that she doesn’t get as mad if I keep the pain under 200 bucks.

I had an old Airport wireless card laying around and also added a 256MB stick of memory to it to give it a whopping 320MB of ram. The hard drive is only 6GB so I needed to be careful what I actually loaded on it. I started from scratch with my copy of OS X 10.3 Panther. It took a little while, but it loaded fine. I would have liked to put Tiger on it but it doesn’t have a DVD drive and I really didn’t feel like forcing it to work by other means. All Val really uses a computer for is web browsing and checking email. Since her email is a HotMail account she really just needs something portable with a browser. Enter – the Tangerine Hello Kitty purse.

The little bugger really works well. I’m adding this post with it right now. The battery life is fantastic and the performance is much better than I ever expected. So, one more Windows machine out the door and another Apple machine in. I like not worrying about her dealing with viruses and spyware. That’s just a little less support I’ll need to do in my own home.

I call that a win-win.