As I wrote yesterday, I got a new laptop. This is the first brand new laptop I have ever bought. I went with a Dell because I know their workmanship and you can get some pretty good deals through Dell's website. I looked at this as an investment, so I went ahead and loaded up on the features I felt I'd use most, such as the processor (a 1.73 Ghz Intel duocore), ram (2 GB) and video ram (256MB NVidia GeForce Go 7300 Turbocache). It has an 80GB harddrive and the Windows Vista Premium operating system.
Once I got it out of the packaging and set up the AC adapter, it took me a few hours to configure it the way I like. I got rid of some softwares I felt were unnecessary or intrusive, like McAfee Security Center and Google Desktop. Once I tapped into my secure wireless network, I downloaded and installed software that I wanted such as Firefox, AVG Free Antivirus and Open Office 2.2.
Then there was the defragging. I thought that was going to take forever! But I had to do it, all the uninstalling and installing was really slowing down the laptop.
I was very impressed with the way Vista Premium looks! I know it's only doing things that Macs have been doing for years but I never thought I'd find a version of Internet Explorer that actually worked well and looks pretty good! I still have a preference for Mozilla Firefox but IE was working hard to get my attention.
Also, I was relieved that Microsoft still makes it possible to do just about everything four different ways in Windows. If the "new" way doesn't suit you, or you want to access an "old" tool, all you have to do is dig a little and you'll find it.
I still have more goodies to install and bookmarks to copy from Google Bookmarks, etc. but I am already very happy with my new toy.
Best Wishes,
Allen
1 comment:
I hope you have better success getting your older software to work on VISTA than I have. I ended up having to make a separate profile just for a set of programs that would only talk to each other with the UAC turned off.
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