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, been running Ubuntu most of the day…well, granted, I haven’t done a heck of a lot yet between playing with the screen stuff, going out to dinner and other real like sort of things. I want to start making note of programs I’m using here as compared to Windows. I don’t know if all of them are the best choices, but this will help me keep track of stuff I try. And of course if anyone else actually reads this at some points and has suggestions… by all means, leave a comment.

Ok, let’s start with the easy stuff.

AVG - I don’t have a replacement, cause don’t really need anything that does what it did. What can be easier than that?

OpenOffice, Thunderbird, Firefox, FileZilla - these are all programs I used under XP. I exported my bookmarks for Firefox to the data drive and they imported just fine. I forgot to export my RSS stuff, so once I get Sage and such set up again I’ll have to export my list of feeds from my office computer I suppose. FileZilla, I’ll have to export my settings from my portable version that I use at work and other places, but I otherwise expect the transition to be seamless.

Thunderbird; I had my main account setup as POP before, and checked two others via IMAP. I changed all three to be IMAP on the new setup. I have a local folder called “keepers”, with a subfolder for each account. I used to do a LOT of sorting, and decided it’s not worth it. With the new searching in email and on desktops in general, what’s the point. Basically any email I want to keep gets moved to that local folder. Also, all email I send from all three accounts goes to a ’sent’ folder on the local setup so I keep a copy of every email I send.

AIM - As much as I didn’t care for the AOL software itself (I would often tell friends it is just a couple lines of code short of being a virus), I’ve always liked AIM. I’ve tried others over the years and kept going back to AIM. I’ve been using Pidgin portable off my USB drive at work when I need to get online to check with someone. It’s… good. I think right now my biggest issue is that I really like the side-tab setup for the different IMs in AIM. Pidgin puts them on the top and I can’t find a way to change that. It’s been annoying at times because I often have a dozen or more IMs going in a given evening. I like having the side tabs listing all the conversations out there for me. Get too many in Pidgin, and you have to scroll through the tabs. I’ve missed IMs because of this recently.

Now, I am really liking the multiple desktops in Ubuntu, and the fact that I can have the IM window follow me between desktops is slick. Hopefully that will help minimize missing stuff. There is another IM program I’ve seen posted about that I have to find again and check out.

Ok, so that’s it for starters - that’s bout all I’ve had a chance to get through yet… other than using Rhythmbox for playing music so far. But I hear there are some real good ones out there so I want to check on that some more.