nullroute | hosts | Sunset

Marketing photo of the laptop

Model: hp compaq nx9000 (from their “lowercase” era)
CPU: Intel Pentium 4 M (Northwood) @ 2.00 GHz
RAM: 512 MB (448 MB usable, 64 MB reserved for GPU)
HDD: 40 GB
GPU: ATI Radeon IGP 340M, screen: 1024x768
OS: Windows XP Pro SP3

Sunset is one of my daily devices at home, serving as an X terminal, text editor, and sometimes music player. It is where most of hosts/*.html was written (using Notepad2), but most of the time it's displaying a few Xterm windows from Myth via VcxSrv and/or folders via Lanman SMB (all through an added TP-Link USB Wi-Fi adapter, as the integrated wireless module is 802.11b-only).

The nx9000 is a positively average laptop. It looks exactly like a HP business laptop from mid-2000s is expected to look like: serious design with clean lines, few frills or weird design choices, it's almost boring compared to Fujitsu, but quite pleasant to use – more so given that it still looks almost brand new. The only significant downside is its keyboard, whose keys need a considerable amount of force to press; typing on it quickly becomes tiring.

It runs Windows XP, partly for retrocomputing reasons and partly because I couldn't get a (modern) Linux to boot on this laptop – at least not from USB, as every kernel had troubles talking to the flash drive through the USB controller; and although it has a CD-ROM drive that it could also boot from, I decided to keep Windows on it instead.

Sunset is part of the Dunelab Active Directory domain (though not located anywhere near Dunelab proper).