Seriously, I’ve had this ultra-compact notebook since the fall of 2000 (since the Clinton administration!) and it just passed away this past week when I put it in my bag and took it home from the office. I have no idea why it decided to leave for another plane, because I was gentle with it on the way home. But those VAIOs, as I discovered in my second year of ownership, are exceedingly fragile. In fact, they’re junk, and while 3.5+ years is a decent lifespan for a Windows machine, I find it not a little shameful that the machine, for the past two years, has been pretty much unusable.
Such a Tool
The only reason I kept it around was as a quality assurance machine, on which I could test my work against an old installation of Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5. So my main lament when I realized it was gone was for a way to access that ancient, pestering version of IE that some stubborn fraction of the Web user population refuses to give up.
Luckily there᾿s the work that Ethan Marcotte did to make it possible to run multiple versions of IE on a single computer. I downloaded one of the hacked software packages yesterday and put it on my Hewlett-Packard at the office and was able to run IE 5.5 on Windows XP without a hitch. Thank goodness, because I really didn’t want to buy another Windows laptop and install Windows 2000 on it just to get access to IE 5.5. In fact, I’d be pretty happy if I don’t have to buy any more Windows hardware again, ever.
+