From XPS to Vostro

Two days ago, I received my new laptop from Dell after almost a two-week wait. The model bought this time is Dell Vostro. The decision was made after seeing a promotion deal in conjunction with our independence day today. My previous laptop was an XPS 2-in-1 Ultrabook, bought about four years ago. Before that it was also a Dell XPS without the tablet and touch-screen ability (and it served me for about seven years) and the one before was a Dell Lattitude (a desktop replacement). While XPS is still the top-of-the-line among Dell models, I thought I should settle for less this time, essentially just to cut cost.

The purchase was necessary as my old laptop had screen problems, beginning with the appearance of stripes, then a cycle of bright and dark screen states and finally before the new laptop arrives, instances (and later prolonged periods) of the screen turning completely dark. Had to purchase an appended LCD monitor while waiting for the new laptop to arrive for me to continue to do work.

Finally my Vostro laptop arrived and I started to install needed softwares and restore needed files, just in time for important meetings the next day (note: our meetings have gone paperless and the need of use of laptops).

Installing LaTeX took me the whole night; found out that I could not install MikTeX and thus instead I installed TeXLive (yet to try this out). Fork out my own money to purchase MathType for Microsoft Office (now on subscription), an equation editor with LaTeX capabilities, since most of my old and admin documents are in Microsoft Word. Despite what people think of MS Word, the software expanded with the equation editor MathType, can actually produced LaTeX-like documents (just use Euclid type fonts instead for the normal tTimes Roman fonts). Finally, got myself the software Mathematica with a personal license (without subscription). This is quite an investment but there was an offer that goes along with Wolfram's 30th anniversary. While I'm not a heavy Mathematica programmer (though my students are), I have been using this scientific software ever since I came back from my PhD. At some point I tried to campaign for the university to take up campus-wide license for Mathematica, but unfortunately it was unsuccessful (engineer-related community tend to use Matlab and those in maths tend to use Maple). Today, the Malaysian universities that have campus-wide license for Mathematica are Universiti Malaya, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Universiti Teknologi Petronas and Monash University Malaysia Campus (lucky them).

Some may ask why not buy these under research grant. Well, first and foremost, I have been without research grant for almost two years now. Secondly, during those early research years (1990s) when I had research grants, I did acquire laptops using my research grant but then someone cynically commented that the laptop usage is not just for research but has been used for personal matters. Thereafter, I have always bought laptops using my own savings, to keep a clear conscience, apart from a few years back when I bought a laptop for the students (group usage). I do not really agree with what the person said since it is essentially impractical to divide work-personal computer usage since most of the time we tend to do things seamlessly. In any case, the computer use has always been mainly for work more than anything else. Anyway, now, after spending so much for the laptop and the softwares, I will be in the saving mode for at least a few months.