Twoo Wuv

Yes, despite his major character flaw that I thought would be a deal breaker, I do indeed love my new laptop.

It’s a Champagne Sony Vaio CR203E. It was on its way out, with new, bigger, and shinier models coming int to take the spotlight, but despite the fact he was picked up at a significant price reduction, and despite the fact he’s running Windows Vista, he’s still pretty marvelous. All I wanted was a solid dependable machine with a keyboard that wouldn’t drive me crazy, but I’ve found more.

Of course this may have something to do with the fact that this is the first brand new computer I’ve gotten. All my other personal computers have been hand-me-downs and upgrades. Now, he was a display model, so other hands caressed him possessively as he sat out to be oggled, but I brought him home, gave him a good cleaning, and now he’s shiny and pretty much perfect.

His few foibles (the aforementioned Vista, a touch pad instead of a trackpoint) can live with, since I don’t have to share him with anyone, or turn him back into work at some unknown point in the future, so I can make the adjustments that work for me. Plus, I got a new wireless mouse, which makes the pain of the trackpoint easier to handle.

So don’t mind me, I’ll just be over here typing away, and enjoying the fact that no one else’s germs will be on the keyboard but mine.

3 Responses to “Twoo Wuv”

Jeri from Whateveresque Says:
December 30th, 2007 at 2:07 am
How FUN! I love a new computer. Well, not all the Windoze updates, nor all the crapware they bundle with it, but just the shiny new speediness of it all. Enjoy!
Jim Wright Says:
December 30th, 2007 at 2:16 am
I’ve been pretty happy with Vista.

I’ve had Vista Ultimate running on my server for a month now, no crashes, no reboots. I’ve noticed some funky behavior with the screen saver and power management processes. But other than that it’s been very stable. And I love the Aero Shell. I think the difference is that the machine was designed to run Vista - very high-end, powerful HP. I understand that upgrading from XP to Vista is a full of problems, but that was always my experience with Windows of any stripe, doing an upgrade from 95 to 98, or 98 to XP (I skipped the whole Windows Millennium/2000 bit) was a mess. My experience says format the drive and do a completely clean install, not an upgrade.

And, of course, Vista requires a pretty hefty hardware platform - but that’s a normal progression, just as Windows 95 required a lot more machine than MS DOS 3.21.

I think Vista has gotten a bad rap. True there are bugs, and some driver issues. But many of those problems are being patched even as we speak. So far I’ve been very happy with it - the networking functions are leaps and bounds better than XP.

I still use XP on my laptop because it’s a tablet/pen machine (I use it for sketching and artwork, in addition to writing) and I don’t dare find out how Vista handles the specialized pen/tablet functions.
Michelle Says:
December 30th, 2007 at 9:59 am
Since I know that every install requires updates, I had built in several hours of downloading updates and Firefox and all that other important stuff into my computer prep time. And I’ve done it enough that I actually had a pretty good estimate of how long it would take.

Jim,
I’m using Vista on one of my computers at work, fresh install. In fact, it was the third fresh install I’d done on various computers. In fact, I’m currently the one in my department who fields support calls for Vista, so I’m far more familiar with Vista than I want to be. (Now Office 2007 is a totally different story. I *love* Office 2007.)

I just don’t like Vista as n operating system. I despise the damned dialog boxes that come up whenever I want to install or upgrade something (I’ve got half them turned off, but can’t remember how to get the rest of the turned off.) Printer installation is a pain on my network at work, as is connecting to the work network. The problem I have is they seemed to have dumbed down things to the point that I have to go through the stupid wizards to do anything-at least as far as I’ve been able to figure out so far.

And that doesn’t even consider the fact that Vista doesn’t work with a lot of the software we’re using at work. That’s just maddening. Both IE7 and Vista have a lot of unnecessary conflicts (IE7… Grrrr… Don’t even get me started on IE7…)