New Laptop

Old laptop:

New laptop:

I like the new one better One of the reasons I disappeared for a while and stopped updating my page was the (somewhat timely) demise of my old Laptop. I’d had the thing for 3 1/2 years, which certainly isn’t a bad run for a laptop. It didn’t completely break down. But apparently the graphics card stopped working, and neither the internal screen nor any externally connected displays received any signal. Rather than replacing the graphics card, which would run me several hundred dollars (since it’s a built-in laptop card) I decided to get a new laptop instead.

This was the first time I seriously looked into getting a MacBook Pro as my laptop. They’re sleek, user friendly, and “artsy”, which is what I look for in my laptop. But ultimately, there were two main reasons I didn’t get a Mac after all:

1. MacOS doesn’t run Microsoft OneNote natively, and I use OneNote a lot to keep notes, write articles, and manage my projects, and
2. For the price that Mac would have cost, I could get much better specs in a Windows laptop.

So now I have a Dell XPS M1530, with 4GB of memory, a built-in R/W Blu-Ray drive, and a better CPU and GPU than the MacBook Pro. And I still paid less.

The new laptop came with Windows Vista, and as much aversion as I have to new Microsoft operating systems, I decided to give it a try and see how long Vista would take to annoy the crap out of me. Well, so far it hasn’t done that yet. It’s not a significant upgrade over what XP can do, and without buying a new computer I would never recommend the switch. But it’s kinda neat. With various caveats, of course. The default security settings for Vista are so ridiculous that they might as well be it “Microsoft Babysitting”, and there’s the curious case of Vista not playing my Windows Media files. WTF? I copied over various .wmv files just before a presentation, obviously expecting them to play without a hitch, and instead they don’t work. I have to use VideoLAN to play those files. Stupid, stupid, stupid, and way too typical for Microsoft.

But all things considered I’m happy with the new laptop. I used it almost exclusively to get the new webpage up and running.