Triela

Triela is an Acer laptop that I received from my best friend in trade for letting him sell my netbook to get money to get by; Triela set a couple firsts for me, being the first 17-inch and, arguably, the heaviest laptop I've owned (Shizuma takes the crown for the most expensive). Triela was also the best deal for the price, as everything else in the price range had a 15-inch screen and a shared-memory GPU.

Triela has an AMD Phenom II x4 N970 processor, an AMD Radeon HD 6450M dedicated-memory GPU, and came with 4GB DDR3 RAM, which was upgraded to 8GB.

The numeric keypad is quite nice, since when I received it, I was pretty literate with it - used to using it at work for number entry. The keyboard is nice too, moving some of the "useless" keys (such as Scroll Lock) to a function-activated key (so in the case of the Scroll Lock, it's Fn+12 to toggle). The main thing I don't like is the absence of indicators, so it's impossible to tell if any of the locks are on or off by glance.

I used Shizuma's old bag for a while to carry Triela in, putting her in the main accessories pouch - since it was the only place she would fit properly, and once I was able to, I bought a larger bag.

Triela is named after Triela from Gunslinger Girl because of Triela's (character) fluency in 3 languages (Italian, French, and German), and since I had a tri-boot environment with Triela, it worked out perfectly. (Originally, the netbook was named Triela (probably for the same reason, though I had more than 3 operating systems installed), but since I relinquished the netbook, she was no longer Triela.) The tri-boot consisted of Windows 7, openSUSE 11.3, and Ubuntu 11.04, with Windows and openSUSE being the most used environments. Ubuntu was only installed for GRUB 2, since GRUB from openSUSE didn't detect Windows; later, openSUSE began using GRUB2 (roughly around 12.2), and I was able to remove Ubuntu.

Triela has five partitions, one for Windows, one for openSUSE, one for swap, one for common storage, and one as a test-bed partition. Since Triela's GPU is the mobile variant the actual 6450, graphics drivers can get a bit weird - making it good for testing (though so far, Debian was the only one to use the wrong graphics driver - VESA instead of radeon).

I mainly use Triela when I'm over at my best friend's place, but I do use her at home sometimes as well.



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