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torquillWell, my new laptop arrived (two days after it left Asia -- impressive.) I like it, though there are the usual pros and cons; Compaq has succumbed to the recent fad of Very Shiny LCD Screens, which means I feel like I'm looking through a highly polished window. Distracting if there's anything illuminated behind me. It has a widescreen, which is okay, the logo on the lid is much less obnoxious than on the old one (which I covered up with a WoSaT logo), and it's a little lighter and much better balanced than the old one. What's really nice: a dual-layer DVD burner (stock), a dual-core CPU which I didn't know I was getting, the 160-gig hard drive I upgraded to (space, the final frontier), an Atheros wireless chip, and they finally decided to put in a hatch for hard drive replacement. The wireless-antenna button is out of the way and hard to press accidentally, which is a nice change. Only three USB ports, but at least they aren't wedged in next to everything else. It runs significantly cooler, which may be a function of being much thinner.
In the "bad" category, I can't come up with anything, really. I'm a little disappointed that they stopped including a full OS installation disc, but oh well.
When we get to "ugly": wow, Vista. Not visually -- I don't have an issue with the way it looks. But it has continued the trend that has driven me further and further away from Microsoft products: they're okay to use, but you have to cross barbed wire, three checkpoints with armed guards, a minefield, automatic surveillance, and a couple of doors with encrypted code locks, then submit to a retinal scan. I know they're trying to make a pleasant user experience at the end of it, but I just can't relax in the nice padded room at the bottom of the bunker.
Intellectual property protection, battling piracy, yadda yadda... all I know is that every time I turn around in this system, it feels like someone's asking for my papers. They ask nicely, but ugh.
It's also sluggish, even on a system with a nice video card and a gig of ram. I put up with pigs like OpenOffice occasionally, but I don't want that sort of performance from my OS. Add to that the steaming pile that is Compaq's "Create Restore Discs" utility -- I wish they'd told me beforehand that it would take three and a half hours to make a three DVD set -- and I have been seriously underwhelmed. HP makes good equipment, for the most part, but some of their custom software is another matter.
I do have the restore discs now, anyway... they're useless to me unless I want to restore to factory defaults (you've got to boot into rescue mode and work from there, not helpful when running a Windows VM) but at least they make me feel better about blowing away the 12-gig restore partition on the drive itself. So far as I know, the discs have all the functionality of the partition, as they're supposed to be able to handle a full catastrophic disk failure, so I shouldn't be losing anything. And I want to be rid of Vista so much it itches.
If anybody out there has a hard copy of Vista Basic, I have a valid key (never been used) and I'd like to use it to set up a Vista virtual machine... just in case something comes along that wants Vista. It's definitely not urgent; for now I'll be content with an Ubuntu "Hardy Heron" install with a WinXP VM. (I have noted that using Vista Basic in a virtual machine is expressly prohibited by the EULA, but if there was ever an example of a victimless crime, I'd say that's it. It gives me a little satisfaction to go and snip through one of the lines of barbed wire, anyway.)
The new laptop's name is Markanav. (Don't ask what my namespace is.) Once it's set up, Harkin will be put on semi-active duty as a backup/lending machine, as it still works fine. After a few months when I'm settled in on Markanav, I'll wipe the dual-boot on Harkin and put in just a user-friendly linux install. It's rare these days that anyone would need a specifically-Windows machine as a loaner unless they had very specialized software to install on it as well, and I don't see that being likely.
Oh, and my parents told me that they'll reimburse me for the laptop, as a graduation present. :)
In the "bad" category, I can't come up with anything, really. I'm a little disappointed that they stopped including a full OS installation disc, but oh well.
When we get to "ugly": wow, Vista. Not visually -- I don't have an issue with the way it looks. But it has continued the trend that has driven me further and further away from Microsoft products: they're okay to use, but you have to cross barbed wire, three checkpoints with armed guards, a minefield, automatic surveillance, and a couple of doors with encrypted code locks, then submit to a retinal scan. I know they're trying to make a pleasant user experience at the end of it, but I just can't relax in the nice padded room at the bottom of the bunker.
Intellectual property protection, battling piracy, yadda yadda... all I know is that every time I turn around in this system, it feels like someone's asking for my papers. They ask nicely, but ugh.
It's also sluggish, even on a system with a nice video card and a gig of ram. I put up with pigs like OpenOffice occasionally, but I don't want that sort of performance from my OS. Add to that the steaming pile that is Compaq's "Create Restore Discs" utility -- I wish they'd told me beforehand that it would take three and a half hours to make a three DVD set -- and I have been seriously underwhelmed. HP makes good equipment, for the most part, but some of their custom software is another matter.
I do have the restore discs now, anyway... they're useless to me unless I want to restore to factory defaults (you've got to boot into rescue mode and work from there, not helpful when running a Windows VM) but at least they make me feel better about blowing away the 12-gig restore partition on the drive itself. So far as I know, the discs have all the functionality of the partition, as they're supposed to be able to handle a full catastrophic disk failure, so I shouldn't be losing anything. And I want to be rid of Vista so much it itches.
If anybody out there has a hard copy of Vista Basic, I have a valid key (never been used) and I'd like to use it to set up a Vista virtual machine... just in case something comes along that wants Vista. It's definitely not urgent; for now I'll be content with an Ubuntu "Hardy Heron" install with a WinXP VM. (I have noted that using Vista Basic in a virtual machine is expressly prohibited by the EULA, but if there was ever an example of a victimless crime, I'd say that's it. It gives me a little satisfaction to go and snip through one of the lines of barbed wire, anyway.)
The new laptop's name is Markanav. (Don't ask what my namespace is.) Once it's set up, Harkin will be put on semi-active duty as a backup/lending machine, as it still works fine. After a few months when I'm settled in on Markanav, I'll wipe the dual-boot on Harkin and put in just a user-friendly linux install. It's rare these days that anyone would need a specifically-Windows machine as a loaner unless they had very specialized software to install on it as well, and I don't see that being likely.
Oh, and my parents told me that they'll reimburse me for the laptop, as a graduation present. :)
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no subject
Date: 2008-05-31 01:38 (UTC)