My New Laptop

I was able to get a new laptop this past week, finally. I’ve been using the desktop, which has been an upgrade in progress for some time, very stable since changing the motherboard to an Athlon 64 instead of the older (not THAT old though) Athlon XP motherboard. The board wasn’t that old, as I inferred above, but the processor was older, sat in another motherboard for a couple of years, at the least. It’s very limiting for me to have only the desktop to use. I had two laptops in the past, both died from stupid problems, not wholly my fault, but the fault of carelessness on others parts (I’m not going to name names!).

Prices on computers of the laptop variety have really gone down. You can still spend upwards of $2,000 for a good machine, but way under that there are many choices. As well, Athlon mobile processors are coming out in laptops of some manfacturers and the newer 64 based mobile processor is what I have in my new HP laptop.

I didn’t like HP for a long while, with my last laptop being a compaq that went to laptop heaven under not-very-nice warranty service problems, right in the middle of the new HP/Compaq merger back when that happened. It was very messy, the dealings we had with everyone then.

Time has resolved my feelings, as well as seeing the products come out in different ways, changing and getting better. Our first home computer was an HP. That itself lent my brain to not be super friendly to the HP way of things. It was a good little desktop, but when we went to upgrade the memory we found the promised one or two sticks to actually be four … which meant we couldn’t add any as we thought, and were told, but had to scrap some to add some, and what use is a 4mb stick anyhow? Ha Ha Ha! Back then it was, when we bought the machine, 16mb of memory, which was superb. It had a Pentium processor. Plain “Pentium” it was a fast machine with a 6 Gig huge harddrive. In the end it wasn’t worth any upgrades as all the other parts, besided the memory and harddrive, were proprietorial. So a friend built us one with some new parts and some old parts he had lying around.

That is the machine that our current one is based on, but I do not think anything exists from that machine anymore except for the harddrive. In any case, it morphed in small and large changes into a decent desktop computer, but still could use a couple of upgrades, like the video card, another stick of memory, and a larger harddrive, a true SATA drive. I have the old 40 gig one in it, we’ve had no issues with it, but with upgrading things this past year I had to use SATA to successfully install a DVD burner and wanted to use SATA for the harddrive, but had to use a converter that came with another motherboard to get my old drive on it. It’s working out alright. A larger true SATA is my desire for it.

My new laptop is running Windows XP Media Center Edition, and I do like it better than XP Home. It’s built on Professional in some form or fashion. Reports itself as Professional in some instances, as well as that’s just a known thing about it, it’s not XP Home. My pleasures with it are the interfaces and the remote control for entertainment media (music, dvd’s, pictures) and many settings for the computer. This model of HP laptop also has a Quick Play function, which I haven’t tried out yet, which lets you use the computer to play movies on dvd and music from the harddrive, or compact discs too (I think), without having the OS turned on.

The Media Center utility is the interface for playing and using all that entertainment stuff in computer mode. It’s like a slick wetsuit to go deep diving in. Win XP Home is swimming naked in the shallower waters. Like I use WMP to listen to my music via computer, and I have the audioscrobbler plugin for WMP which reports my listening to last.fm for tracking via a profile there. WMCE using WMP as default, and the joy of that is immense. WMP10 is great, but not very pretty in most any mode, none really. Media Center takes the meat of WMP and makes it a beautiful outer skin which makes it work well in a pleasing to the eye and brain and fingers way. You can work on your library in WMP, create playlists, change settings, blah, blah, blah. The display of Media Center is such that you can work through choosing your tracks to play in different ways, and beauty is in the details. You can create playlists there too. The thing also is Queing … it’s not the same in WMP, it’s the same as Now Playing list there in WMP but not exactly feeling the same.

In order to get Media Center Edition you have to get a machine pre-loaded with it. It might not be for everyone. For me it’s what a computer is, an all in one entertainment unit that you can get work done on too. 🙂 Most WMCE computers are desktops. I love it that it’s now on some laptops, or more apparent that it is now. I’m thrilled its on big name laptops with Athlon 64 processors.

My laptop’s monitor is a 15.4″ widescreen, and it was funny to me at first, but now I can’t stand looking at the desktop square 19″ LCD panel. It’s way too tall, websites are frustrating in it, too many words on the screen at one time. 🙂 That’s just part of it. It’s the different resolutions. This is 1280×800 which is the smallest resolution I can get with the display settings. The desktops monitor is 1280×1024, which is smaller, and similar but not the same as my laptop. Things look naturally right in my laptop and look gargantuanlly small in the desktop monitor. Small yet broad. It’s like a huge open book with tiny print. Enough with the comparisons, I am liking the widescreen monitor. Left to right reading and looking, less up and down looking is a relief on the eyes (which on the 1280×1024 one must do often.)

So with the advent of the new laptop in my life, I finally upgraded to the newest WP version. I don’t like every aspect of it, but the one that was the worst is dealt with, and is doable under USERS, there’s a checkbox to clear in your profile to get the WYSIWYG “rich text editor” turned off. Relief.

Nearly without saying, but I must actually say it, of course I have Firefox installed on my new laptop, as well as Thunderbird, as my default browser and email clients. Microsoft isn’t totally bad, I do like “windows” when it all works well, as it is do-able, but I like my independent products. So I will be deleting the MS Works that came on this computer, and the MS Office (this came with a 60-day trial, dumb hey?) I use OpenOffice.

When I get a new setup do I use the file settings transfer wizard that windows has? Nah. I start from scratch and just move data here and there as I want to, and set things up piece by piece. I’m a nut that way, it’s half the fun of computing, making a new nest, getting comfy and starting from the beginning once again. There aren’t many places in life where we can do this for real!