I got a nice new Dell e6500 laptop last month.  We got it all set up with a nice new screen and a docking station.  We use Carbonite, the service that unobtrusively and continuously backs up all the files on your computer so that if anything goes wrong you can get everything back.  You pay a reasonable fee for each computer.  We bought three years of service for one computer where we keep all our photos, videos, important documents, etc.  We backed up all our files on a couple of external drives, moved them to what will now be our homework* computer, a Dell Vostro we got last year.  That left us with two computers we can use for whatever we want!

One of the computers that is now free is my old laptop, a Dell Latitude D620.  The other is a Dell something or other desktop that was our old homeschool computer where we had the Carbonite service.  Our plan is to solve an ongoing contention for computer resources.  The old homeschool computer is where the kids always did Rosetta Stone language Spanish and French.  It is also where Lorena (Mom) liked to talk to use Skype to talk to Grandma Conchita in Mexico.  Our plan is to move the language programs over to the homework computer (the Vostro).  Then we will load Ubuntu 10.04 and Skype onto the old homeschool computer because Lorena thinks Windows XP is more complicated.  We were thinking of loading Linux Mint on the computer instead of Ubuntu in deference to our buddy Lyle, but Lorena knows what she likes and she’s the one who cooks for us.

Finally, Christian is going to load Fedora Linux on my old Dell laptop.  Fedora 13 was officially released yesterday.  He and Kelly will use that computer and their little eeePC netbook for college mobility.  There are few other things we want to do like load mySQL on Lorena’s Skype computer so we can use it for learning SQL, but those things will have to wait until we have a little more time.  Hopefully, that will happen before school starts again in August.

*I first wrote homeschool, but we are done with that now–it is like a
new year has started and I keep putting the old year on the checks I
write.