I’ve bought a new laptop, for reasons I won’t get into. It’s my birthday (soon), and I can buy a laptop if I want to, okay? It’s not too shabby.

Screen is 17 inches, if I recall correctly. I don’t like their 14-year-old-girl-nail-polish-silver-glitter with white trim design. The speakers are shit. The keyboard is a bit too mushy and not clicky, and I’m really starting to miss having a scroll wheel (the “right border of the track pad” scrolling system sucks IMHO). But otherwise, it’s a decent laptop.

Attention laptop designers; how about we cut the bullshit symbolic token gesture towards left handed people? Put the mouse device (whether it be the nipple, track pad, or track ball) to the right of the keyboard. Putting it in the center pisses off right handed people, and doesn’t help left handed people. Your concern for left-handed people is bullshit anyway, because since everyone hates their track pad being in the middle, they’re gonna use a mouse, and you’ve put all the USB cables on the right side of the laptop, so you’ve fucked the left handed people anyway. Stop playing games, and make some of your customers happy, instead of making everyone miserable.

Laptop comes with Vista Premium, which supports “sidekick” or whatever it’s called. Basically, it’s an extra display on the outside of your laptop. Think of those flip-top cellphones, where when you open the laptop, there’s a “main” screen, and when you close the laptop, there’s a smaller screen on the outside which shows something like the current time or whatever. Well, I wished my laptop had that second smaller screen, but I can’t honestly think of a good use for it. I’m certainly not gonna take my laptop out of its bag every time I want to check the time.

The laptop has been named ShortTail, by the way. Maybe that’s the name of a bird or something.

This is the desktop as I’ve customized it so far. I grabbed a Lain wallpaper, but it didn’t look good ‘cause it was meant for a 4:3 monitor. So I load up Paint.NET and do some cropping, and I’ve got a 16:9 wallpaper. Then, I change the color scheme from the default Microsoft blue to a matching dark, muted blood red. I also remove the recycle bin, and added some widgets.

I have no idea if these scores are good or not. This was supposed to be a $800 laptop (pretax), but for whatever reason, Dell decided to sell it to me for $700 (also pretax, but with free shipping). I’m not planning on playing games on this, so I didn’t really care what kind of graphics card I got (but it seems to be a not-terrible one). Just needed a “decent” processor for e-mail, web browsing, blogging (so 1Ghz should have been fine). I wanted at least 1 GB of RAM, ‘cause that’s the baseline minimum (IMHO) for a desktop XP machine, but this is a laptop, so it could have less, but it’s a laptop running Vista, so it should have slightly more, which I figured cancels back to 1GB. And I wanted a display resolution of at least 1024x768, but the higher the better. And this is what I got.

Software bundle. The laptop came with McAffe Antivirus (which I promptly uninstalled and replaced with Avast Antivirus), and some sort of Roxio suite, which I think does CD burning stuff and media stuff. It was doing some sort of thumbnail media file scanning thing which was taking up 99% CPU for hours, so I uninstalled that too, but now I’m currently without a CD burner. Not sure if I’ll buy a nero license for this laptop, or just delegate all burning activities to my desktop.

The laptop also came with Microsoft Works, which I guess is an cheap knockoff of Microsoft Office. But the only reason I used Office in the first place was for Outlook, and that was for the integrated e-mail, calendar and todo list that I liked a lot. Vista comes with a built in Calendar program, and if it doesn’t suck, maybe I’ll use it as my replacement for Outlook. If that works out, I can get rid of Office altogether, as “Microsoft Works Word Processor”, as it is affectionately called, looks like a good enough Word replacement as far as my needs on the laptop go (if I actually need the full functionality of Word, I can just use my desktop). I’m very pleased with the idea that I might not need to actually spend any money at all on software for this laptop.