Aftr the disappointment of my old laptop spontaneously combusting, I did indeed rush out, and hammer my credit card, and now have a shiny new laptop, to replace the posthumously named “Carrie”. It shall appear, on my nextwork as “Carrie-2″. Oh, how imaginitive. Of course, if you’ve visited my flickr, or are on my friends list, you’d know that…

The specs are much better than the original machine. AMD Turion, 2Gb RAM, 160Gb HDD and ATI Radeon X1200, presumably the laptop version.

We ended up rushing through to PC World on Tuesday, in order to pick one up. The model I originally opted for happened to be out of stock (typical), so I ended up getting one a little more expensive, but with better specs

Setting it up seemed to take for ever. Although it came “preinstalled”, it still took around an hour for Windows Vista to configure itself. It then took about another half an hour to manually reconfigure the look of Vista so it doesn’t look shiny.

You may have remembered my informative guide to Windows Vista back in February. I’m not quite sure whether my opinion has changed. Obviously, I’ve had the chance to use it a bit more in-depth now, but I don’t think there’s any great advantage over Windows XP SP2. As I mentioned earlier, I switched off as much of the processor-wasting eye candy as I could find, and this improved it greatly. I always believe that operating systems should be functional, and not try to be too pretty. Those split-seconds where windows fade in and out all add up, and as I’m no more than three weeks away from my 28th birthday, I don’t exactly have time to waste. (says he, who is up at 10AM, writing a blog entry)

The next step was to get rid of all of the installed crap. There was some photo uploader rubbish, which allowed you to turn photos into books… pointless. There was also a trial of Office, and Works. Both of them entirely useless, and uninstalled without opening them. I don’t know whether I’ll bother putting any type of office app on there, bit if I do, I’ll just stick with Open Office. It does anything I want from an office package.

Oh, and I managed to get all of the data from the old laptop, but not without a performance. On Monday night, I ordered a hard drive caddy from ebay. It arrived Wednesday morning. I was a little suspicious about the build quality of said device - there was absolutely no quality to the unit whatsoever. Flimsy metal construction, with a little bit of circuit board at one end. Still, it only had to last until I’d copied the important parts of the HDD over.

I was about to format it, when I realised it had totally omitted my old user directory, as, on this new system, I wasn’t the “owner”. This is obviously where all of the “important” stuff is kept, so I have to make sure this was copied over,. Somehow I’d managed to fight through the confusing and contradictory security errors to copy everything that was needed.

That’s a picture (noooo, really?) of it, connected up to the laptop. What can’t be seen is that it also takes 2 USB ports, one for power, and one for data. That blue LED is also stupidly bright.

What is it, and the current surge in popularity of the blue LED? Why is it, that almost every appliance since the PS2 needs to have at least one of them? They looked cool when they first came out, but now they’re just overused. Sigh. The DVD player downstairs has two blue LEDs, the laptop has about 6, both of my proper external hard drives have blue LEDs in them, my card reader has one just as bright,and equally as annoying, expecially in a dark room. Windowcam3 also has a blue LED case fan. Grrr. I don’t like them much anymore.

Oh, and on Tuesday night, the first houses in Raby Road and York Road erected their Xmas decorations. Not the same houses as last year, as they’re now boarded up, presumably awaiting demolition.

Well, I’m off to bed now, to catch some much needed Z’s before work in 9 hours.

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