My New Toy

Well, I've been giving out about my old laptop now for a while, saying bits of it weren't working all that well (like the gfx card, the DVD drive, the wi-fi card, the heatsink, the 'e' key...) and that I was thinking of getting a replacement for it. I was passing though town during the week and saw that Dixons were doing a sale - 10% off all laptops, this weekend only. So, I decided to go in and take a look, and came out with a new toy. This is what I got:



The specs aren't hugely different to the Alienware - same RAM (1Gb), same GFX RAM (128Mb), slower chip (dual-core 1.7Ghz rather than a 2Ghz), bigger HD (100Gb), and what I couldn't get off any similar-specced Dell, an S-video out port so I could watch all the bootleg AVI movies I get off my boss on my wide-screen TV :-) One area where it is bigger tho is the screen - is a 17" rather than the 15.4" I had on the Alienware. One nice change as well is the machine not sounding like a hairdryer when I'm turning it on thanks to the dodgy heatsink causing the fan to be at 100% the whole time!

This is it sitting beside my work laptop:




My work laptop wants to be my new one when it grows up! :-P

One thing about it which is taking a bit of adjustment is that I'm now running Vista. Am not sure do I like it yet, still feels like a toy OS with all the flashy-flashy menu animations and stuff. I'm getting a bit annoyed as well with getting messages up saying "are you really sure you want to do this?" every time I try to install something - plus when I went to install my old version of Norton AV yesterday, I kept getting a dialog popping up that one of the devices Norton was installing was incompatible with Vista. Every time I clicked "OK" or close on it tho so that I could cancel Norton, the dialog would pop up again straight away! Took me nearly half an hour to cancel and roll back Norton in between clicking that fecking dialog! Hopefully there's an admin option there somewhere that I can turn that annoying shit off in!