October 31st, 2007

I haven't been very active in either this blog or MetaphorMountain.com lately. I haven't been pushing it, either. The truth is that the things on my mind these days aren't very bloggable.

One thing, though, is that I bought a new laptop computer to replace the old one ... well ... it will replace the oldish one and the oldish one will replace the oldest one. So right now the total is 3 laptop computers (and two desktops—though one's in storage for lack of space) I will be lightening the load when I give the oldest one to my dad so he can play Solitaire without hogging the main computer. That way my mom can log on to her service provider more often and write me emails and read my rants. How nice.

The new machine comes with a Centrino Core2 Duo processor, 2 Gigs of RAM, an nVidia GeForce 8600M-GS graphics card and 200 Gigs of hard drive storage (though, curiously, in two hard drives). That's a pretty fast machine for the day, and I am very pleased with its performance playing Oblivion, loading and running MS Office programs like Outlook and Word, etc., or doing something in Visual Studio, which can be a real resource hog.

But it takes a small performance hit when it comes to the operating system, Windows Vista. Now, I'm not going to review it here, though I may do so in the future. For now, I just want to say that I don't see what all the hype, positive or negative, is about. It strikes me as mostly change for change's sake. Nothing new that is vital or critically needed, and nothing seriously bad to complain about. Even the networking issues, which many people have troubles with—and I was no exception at first—were able to be resolved with some tuning and tweaking.

So now that I have the new computer, and have handed down the other two laptops, I am very happy with my home computer setup. Really, for what my wife and I use it for, it's probably overpowered ... but what the heck: We aren't mortgage poor since practically nobody can afford a mortgage in this town (I mean, seriously: who buys a $450,000 600-square-foot condo???) so we have the money to burn on such things as top of the line computers. And, besides, it was on sale.

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