crosshaire

after my own heart. She says she'll take my current laptop if I upgrade--she's still using an ancient 6+ year-old Dell P3 laptop as her primary computer, heh. :)

(Come to think of it, my desktop is slightly more than six years old now...)

I've decided I'll have to resist buying anything too expen$ive until after August. Plus it doesn't look like the system requirements for FFXIV PC have even been released yet. :P

Why you do this, Squeenito? Oh why oh why? :P

***

In other news, I tried installing the free Win7 RC1 evaluation copy on a spare 40GB notebook HDD a co-worker gave me eons ago. The OS works pretty good for my simple needs.

Only thing I seem to have lost is the integrated SD card reader in my Compaq laptop but whatever, the stupid thing never did seem to work right. Maybe it only took 1st gen SD cards, who knows. SDHC certainly doesn't read in it. I just use a card reader. Another thing to carry, but no one makes integrated CF readers in laptops, do they? Sucks. :P

Haven't tried the ethernet/monitor/PCMCIA ports yet. Google Chrome is rather flaky--kept losing the connection to amazon.com today while Internet Explorer 8 worked fine. o_O

Windows Defender stealths all my ports by default, although I'm worried that it's letting any old outbound connection through. Gotta figure that one out.

Avast! Antivirus, Skype, Firefox 3.5, Adobe Acrobat 9.x and iTunes all work flawlessly so far, as does Photoshop 5.5 of all things. Gotta install Nero Express and see how that fares too.

Haven't put my programs through tough testing trying to make them explode yet. Could still happen. Blue screen of death? Imminent freeze? Random reset? I know you're there... (Where's the ka-BOOM? Where is the earth-shattering ka-BOOM?)

So far I like that my system boots FAST and shuts down FAST. I'm able to multi-task pretty well under full performance mode. (Fancy Aero glass effects? No thanks.)

And this on my crappy ass not-top-of-the-line-even-when-bought-new-slow-as-summertime three-year-old laptop. Which scores a mighty '1' on the grand Windows Experience Rating. The scale is 1 (worst) to 7.9 (best). >_>;

No, it's not 1 to 10. WTF, weirdos.

Oh, and Win7 copied the Mac OSX? OS9? sticky notes thingie. Gotta try that out ^_^

p.s. Did I mention that Viva Pinata actually runs more smoothly on this crappy (single-proc AMD ML-30 + ATI Radeon Xpress 200m) laptop under Win7? Whatever those programmers are doing, they're magicians. :P