Thursday, April 10, 2008
Presenting . . . !
It is here! After months and years of yearning and ogling, I finally broke down a purchased a new computer. My old computer has not bit the dust (yet), in fact it works as well as it ever did. I knew that if I was going to continue going to school, I would need something far more portable than the eight pound slab of marble that sat on my desk for four years of college. True, it has a gorgeous 15.4 inch screen, great for DVDs and games, but it also developed a few quirks and the battery life wore quite thin. With all the software that passed through that computer, it is a miracle that I never had to reformat, but bugs did accumulate. For example, the mouse will drift to the bottom left corner of the screen in five-second bursts. the wireless card, when removed or disabled, causes the whole system to freeze up. It likes to sometimes begin to hibernate and then forget what it was doing, resulting in another freeze and a manual power cycle.
I purchased my computer on sale, after waiting through a few, and deciding that I did not want to wait too long before prices plateaued (four vowels is a row, wow!) for the school year. The new
computer is roughly seven times more powerful than its predecessor. 30gb hard disk get upgraded to 200. Pentium 4 at 2.2 Ghz with M technology goes up to Core 2 Duo at 2.0 with Centrino tech (not sure how that converts). 512 Mb of memory to 3gb. CD-R with DVD player to DVD-R. Regular screen to HD (with an HDMI input). Remote control.
The newbie comes with Vista, about which I am not sure. It seems to function very similarly to XP, but with upped graphics. There are some quirks I don't like, such as a lack of menus and left-side closability on some system windows. Moreover, Microsoft seems to be dumbing down the settings and weakening the ability to change them. Instead of having the familiarity of the all the options laid out in a given Control Panel or Settings Window, the OS will instead list some likely tasks, but make it hard to find specific, advanced or less likely options. Also, when you hibernate or sleep the computer, the screen turns off before the computer shuts down. While this a a power-conscious feature, it does not let you see the computer enter whichever power-save mode you have chosen. It takes away from the transparency of the platform. Also the amount of pre-installed software is ridiculous. between Photoshop and Elements, that is seven gigs gone. Add in at least another eight for Vista, and that is already half my old computer. Progress reports as I use it more!
I like that the keyboard is not too small.
I purchased my computer on sale, after waiting through a few, and deciding that I did not want to wait too long before prices plateaued (four vowels is a row, wow!) for the school year. The new
computer is roughly seven times more powerful than its predecessor. 30gb hard disk get upgraded to 200. Pentium 4 at 2.2 Ghz with M technology goes up to Core 2 Duo at 2.0 with Centrino tech (not sure how that converts). 512 Mb of memory to 3gb. CD-R with DVD player to DVD-R. Regular screen to HD (with an HDMI input). Remote control.
The newbie comes with Vista, about which I am not sure. It seems to function very similarly to XP, but with upped graphics. There are some quirks I don't like, such as a lack of menus and left-side closability on some system windows. Moreover, Microsoft seems to be dumbing down the settings and weakening the ability to change them. Instead of having the familiarity of the all the options laid out in a given Control Panel or Settings Window, the OS will instead list some likely tasks, but make it hard to find specific, advanced or less likely options. Also, when you hibernate or sleep the computer, the screen turns off before the computer shuts down. While this a a power-conscious feature, it does not let you see the computer enter whichever power-save mode you have chosen. It takes away from the transparency of the platform. Also the amount of pre-installed software is ridiculous. between Photoshop and Elements, that is seven gigs gone. Add in at least another eight for Vista, and that is already half my old computer. Progress reports as I use it more!
I like that the keyboard is not too small.
# posted by Daniel @ 12:55 PM 
