We haven’t been doing our part to support the ailing economy here at Casa Armed Liberal, but we have bought a few things, and I thought I’d comment on them…<\/p>\n
My old Lenovo t60 started exhibiting bad behavior – which I finally tracked down to something mechanical – when I moved it while it was running, I’d get a BSOD. Not the best behavior for a laptop that’s often used at the breakfast table or on the sofa.<\/p>\n
So I went shopping – for about 3 hours I considered a Macbook Pro – and settled on a Dell Vostro 3400<\/a> with an i5 processor, 4GB or RAM, a 350GM HDD and Windows 7 Pro.<\/p>\n Nice!! Very nice!! I’ve migrated my key files over and set up most of what I use, and golly gosh I like it a lot. It’s smaller than my old 15″ notebook, but that’s as much a feature as a bug, and it seems decently solid. So far, great battery life – I can but a 9-cell battery for it if it becomes an issue. The keyboard touch is a little light, but when I do lots of writing, I’m on a regular one.<\/p>\n I do wish it had a docking station – maybe soon.<\/p>\n Windows 7 was a little awkward at first, but now it’s pretty transparent. And the machine is faaaast<\/i>.<\/p>\n In the course of moving the files to the household desktop to transfer them over, it became obvious that our 10-year old desktop was just filled plumb up. Plus it hasn’t really liked XP (it came w\/Win2K)…so when we went to best Buy to look at NAS, we decided to spend a few hundred more and just go buy a new desktop.<\/p>\n Looking at the reviews on my Droid, the ASUS Essentio minitower looked pretty good, and cheap, but while they were looking for a boxed one, we noticed an Asus CG5275<\/a>…a full-sized tower with great specs – i5 again, 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD, highly expandable…and only $175 more…so we went from a $250 NAS to a $700 desktop. Someone frugal is going to be mad at me…<\/p>\n It’s running Windows 7 Home, and again it’s been really easy to set up. The biggest hassle has been that it has no parallel port so I had to get a USB cable for the B & W printer (an old, reliable HP1200).<\/p>\n I’ve still got to consolidate 800GB of data on the old XP box – there are like seven images of the laptop files system, and move all the remaining data over. But I can take my time to do that.<\/p>\n So we’ve done our computer spend for the next few years…and you may understand why blogging has been light for the last week.<\/p>\n On the non-computer front, I bought some m\/c gear…<\/p>\n My old Held winter m\/c gloves had been getting pretty ragged, so I went out and got some Alpinestars 365<\/a> gloves. I tend to spend a lot of money on gloves because I figure that in reality, I make my living with my fingers…so I like them to be safe.<\/p>\n They have been great. A little warm for warm days, but great from cool to cold, and yesterday I rode home in a small downpour that soaked through my Gore-tex Aerostich suit in a few places – but my hands were dry and toasty.<\/p>\n