Ok, as I posted yesterday, I bought a new laptop. An Acer Extensa 4420. The biggest problem with it, it runs Vista.

I’ll deal for now, but there are a number of things that have to be done to make this thing “ready to fly”. First thing I did was download Firefox. I haven’t done a lot with add-ons with FF3 yet, but I’ll have to look in the best way to sync my bookmarks tween work, home and laptop now. Second thing I did was burn the restore DVDs, so if I need to, I can go back to factory fresh. I am debating on taking this thing down the Linux road… we’ll see. I have some programs I need Windows to run, so until I can test them on the desktop with Wine, I won’t be going that route.

Next thing was ditch MacAffe for AVG. Just a no-brainer there. I had to bite my tongue in Best Buy - While waiting for someone to help me, I observed another sales guy talk to a customer about antivirus and spyware, giving him two packages. “They both have anti-virus and spyware, but the spy-ware on this one sucks, and the virus protection this one sucks, so between these two you’ll be covered.”

Next was Open Office. There’s a 60-day trial of Office on here… need to figure out how to get rid of it without messing anything up. I wish I could get Evolution for Vista… I’m using it on my desktop and rather like it, so will probably stick with Thunderbird for now.

I have AutoCad, a mapping program, and some construction related stuff for work I need to get on here, but beyond that I’m not sure that I’ll be putting that much more. I have portable versions of a few things like GIMP, Pidgin and a couple others on my thumb drive that I may use here and there. The whole idea is for me to keep this thing light-weight. The majority of the stuff being done on it will be web based or basic spreadsheet and document writing.

Oh yea, when I unpacked the thing, the battery said 75%, and about 1.5 hours remaining. So I figured.. hey.. 2 hour battery. Not bad. Not great. But now that i’s fully charged, it’s telling me there is just over 3 hours remaining… so that’s better. I may look into a second, or a larger battery… but will wait and see how much I need to work just off battery for a bit first.

I bought a new laptop last night, and yes, I am blaming my sister.

Ok, need to back up. Seven Eight years ago next month, my niece and nephew were born. Waaaaay too early. They were born at like 24 or 27 weeks. Cole weighed a whopping 1lb, 11oz when he was born. His sister came in at 1lb 1oz. Unfortunately, they’ve been dealing with issues every since.

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Ok, I spent most of Friday evening and yesterday archiving a bunch of old files to spare hard drives with my usb-ide cable. A 20gig drive has all the old files that I know I haven’t touched in forever. Old versions of websites, old documents, etc. Also dumped all my “my programs” stuff where I keep copies of programs I download to try. That pretty much filled that up and then it was all deleted from my D drive.

Moved all my photos to a 15gig drive - I may put them back on the hard drive once the switch is over, we’ll see. Copied all my MP3s to a 10gig - I’ll figure a way to back up my music to this drive every once in awhile from now on.

Defragged the D drive, it’s a 120gig that’s about 1/3 full at the moment. My external 120, Z drive will get formatted and ready for new backups once I’ve settled in.

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