Life On Mars: Laptop

Whoo!! I got a new laptop today!! Well, I should say I got my first new laptop. I've always had hand-me-downs that just never seem to work too well and basically would get to use them for a couple of days and then poof, no usuable laptop anymore. Bah. But now... *holds laptop up into a single ray of sunlight while angels sing "aaahhhhh!!"* Uber.

Let me rattle off its specs, which I imagine most of you won't even understand and half I don't even either(well, a little), but hey... still cool:

This is an Acer brand laptop with Intel Core 2 Duo processor T5250 (1.5 Ghz, 667 Mhz FSB, 2MB L2 cache), 2GB DDR2 memory, 250GB HDD, 1024MB NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS Tubo Cache video card (which supposedly is good for gaming... better be), 17" WXGA+ Acer CrystalBrite LCD (screen), 802.11a/b/g/Draft-N WLAN wireless, a disk drive that can burn CD-ROM and DVD, as well as play CD-ROM, DVD and Blu-Ray (which apparently everyone thinks this is going to be the cornered market over HD-DVD), plus a built in web-cam with pretty good quality and of course, like everything installed these days, Windows Vista.

I basically walked in and said, "I need a laptop. And this is what its main functions need to provide... To process Adobe Photoshop well and to play World of Warcraft well. Oh, and to be able to do these two things at least fine at the same time." After being shown some nice computers by the nice Best Buy boy, I mentioned I needed it a little cheaper and he directed me to this one.

It was under $1000 but came to just a little over with the "idiot-proof" insurance/service warranty added on. Because, yeah, if I drop it in the bathtub...

The only problems I have with it so far is certain keys on the keyboard are too easy to hit when typing (such as the CAP lock key) and the touchpad.

Touchpads on laptops are the spawn of the devil. I'll be typing along, say in a blog post and suddenly I'm typing ten lines up, inside text I've already written; I guess because my hand brushed the touchpad and the computer registered it as me wanting to go where the cursor is currently hanging out. It is so extremely annoying, I can't even tell you. I don't like complications in my word processing. And I don't like having to hold my hands in a certain position so the side of my thumb doesn't brush the touchpad and upset it. You're too sensitive, go get some therapy, you dumb touchpad!!

I'm a mouse user. Mice are good. Touchpads are bad. So probably in settings where I'll be able to use a mouse (home, cafe, etc.), I'll use a mouse. On planes, etc, I'll suffer with the touchpad.

Another thing I don't like about my laptop is actually not about the laptop itself but what's on it. Windows Vista. I have Windows XP on my desktop. "Grew up" with DOS and Win95. Somehow thankfully managed to skip Windows 3.1, and continually upgraded, Win 97, somehow missing Windows 2000 as well. And NT. To XP. I'm fine with XP. But everything comes with Vista these days whether you like it or not. But hey, I didn't really know the difference between XP and Vista, and although I don't have anything major against Macs, I'm not buying one at this point, so I'm stuck with Vista.

And really, I don't see any major differences except looks. It's all sort of chrome-ish without being metallic. Sleek, modern looking icons and such. I'm not hugely fond with the looks but it might be partly getting used to the 17" widescreen monitor. One big difference though about Vista is the CONSTANT requests to Allow or Cancel various actions you might take throughout your usage of the program. It's very annoying.

So this perfectly (if not a little bit exaggerated) exemplifies my experience with Windows Vista thus far. It's one of those cute Mac vs PC commercials with the two guys standing side by side.