My New Laptop

I finally broke down and had the company buy me a new laptop. My first laptop was a Compaq I bought in 2000, it was an awesome machine. It lasted until December 2003. Finally the hard drive died, I believe it was a 600MHZ Pentium or something. I then took Velvet's old Compaq that we bought in December 2002, it was a 950MHZ Pentium. I used it until about 3 weeks ago. It was a terrible machine. Velvet bought a Dell about a year ago that has performed reasonably well.

I'm really stubborn when it comes to getting a new computer, I try to get everything I can out of a machine until it dies. I think it comes from my poor background. Hell, I used my Commodore 64 from the 2nd grade until my junior year of high school, no joke. That computer was definitely the best computer I've ever owned, but that's a different story.

Besides the Compaq being dog slow (which I really didn't mind because I use SSH for almost everything except email), it had the following issues:

1. The battery only lasted 23 minutes before it would shut off the computer, losing all work.
2. The computer would shut off randomly if the CPU got too hot. I never figured out what made it run so hot, but I did notice that when I had the AIM window open and an advertisement ran with animation the CPU would spike to 100% and shortly thereafter the machine would shut down. Needless to say, I now have a habit of keeping AIM always minimized.
3. The monitor part of the laptop would not stay up on it's own. It would fall back when you opened it, so I had to always prop it up with two pillows. Jordan even knew to put two pillows behind it before opening it, I hope she doesn't grow up thinking that's how *all* computers work.
4. The fan was so loud that I had to turn the TV up about 4 notches to hear it. I remember whenever we would watch movies I would turn off the laptop for a better movie experience.
5. The last straw for the Compaq came when the power cord would no longer stay in socket, so it was impossible to charge. This was the second adapter I bought for it, the first had a different problem that was replaceable, this problem was impossible to fix

Now, my new Sony Vaio is great. The screen is bright, you can actually put it on your lap without worrying about 2nd degree burns, it's quiet as can be, and it's extremely fast. The power cord is a little short, but I don't really need it since the battery last about 2.5 hours (not great, but beats 23 minutes). My only complaint was the crazy amount of software pre-installed. Software? Who uses software? All of the software I actually use, I had to download:

1. Putty
2. AIM
3. Open Office
4. Firefox
5. Programmer's Notepad

Oh, wow, somebody remind me again why Microsoft exists? OK, so I still use them for a window manager, but maybe I don't need to.....