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.

Ok, moving from one computer to another is proving painless so far. Downloaded Griffith, if yer running Ubuntu 7.10 you have to grab 0.9.5, the repository has 0.9.4 which doesn’t like Gutsy. There were some dependency issues, so I ended up installing 0.9.4 from the repository first, then upgraded using the DEB file for 0.9.5.

Then, I copied the .griffith folder from the old computer to the new one, and when I started Griffith on the new, voila, everything was there including the half-dozen new movies I just added today.

Then I started up Evolution on the old computer and after it was done checking for new messages. A simple File - Backup Settings and everything was dumped to a tar file on my SD card. Popped it in the new computer and started Evolution on the new one. One of the first things it did was ask if I wanted to restore settings from a backup.

Still trying to get the Centro to sync, it’s having trouble seeing the phone, but I need to get my other cable… I was having issues with this cable before.