New Laptop

For those of you following the 'diet Coke in the laptop' saga, I got yukky news today. The best price anyone could find on a motherboard to replace the one I fried was $800. Now, I don't know if any of you have been watching laptop prices, but you can buy a laptop nicer than the one I had for right around that price.

That meant a trip to the lovely computer store. Yes, I could have ordered one. Yes, I could have gotten a discount through Tom's job. But 1) I'm sick of not having a laptop after I've been so used to having one and 2) there are some screamin' sales. I found this lovely creature with $150 in rebates, to bring the price under $1000. It even has more than twice the RAM I had in the old laptop, and a faster processor and bigger hard drive.

And, since there's no love lost between me and the maker of my last laptop, this one is also about half as heavy, has better keyboard and trackpad action (and no, that's not judged on an old, broken-in keyboard--I recently replaced the busted-ass keyboard in the old laptop, and don't think I don't wish I had that money back) and it also has a bitchin' fingerprint reader.

After just a bit of twiddling, this laptop is not only on my LAN and sharing files with the desktop PC, but I can login to the machine and to most of the websites I visit where I have a username and password with only a swipe of my index finger on my fingerprint reader. Swanky!

I have almost all of my old applications reinstalled (everything I really use is open source anyway, so I just popped to a few websites and downloaded the installers) and the files that the repair shop could copy off my old hard drive (they did a good job, and gave me a great deal on an external hard drive that they copied the files onto, which I will now use for much more frequent backups--my last big backup was in March, boo me) are now in my brand-new documents folder. Those thankfully include an installer for the program I use to burn bitchin' DVDs of the B that I couldn't re-download, as well as project files and movies that were lovingly transferred from the video camera and then edited. There were also about a dozen pictures of the B that didn't exist anywhere else, and that has been taken care of as well.

So this is the end of the laptop/coke disaster of 2006. I feel guilty for burning the money, but everyone's human, right? Keep those cans away from the expensive electronics, all right? Take it from me.