seticat

Remember when I mentioned earlier today about the funny little ~click~? After a VA appointment I had this this afternoon I had this sudden, really strong urge to go look at possible laptops. So my first stop was Best Buy. And after a moment of deep thought [and the realization that said funny ~click~ may be part of the odd 'buzz' I've been hearing from time to time and studiously ignoring and that it is, most likely, Bella's hard drive and not the fan as I've been hoping] I'd like you to meet Raffaella, Raffi for short.

I'd love to say this is Raffi, but it is actually Raffi's twin who is something like 2 minutes older: read 'Raffi is the outgoing model and Raffi's twin sister is the new incoming model.

Asus - Laptop / Intel® Core™ i7 Processor / 17.3" Display / 8GB Memory - Black

{FWIW: My laptops have always had female names like Bella [Isabella] and and my desktops have had male sounding names like Quinto, Giuseppe and Luigi}

In other words, I just got this same laptop at Best Buy on open source, clearance and the last one in the shop [the display model] for a lot cheaper because it's the outgoing version of the same model. So far as any of us at BB could tell [three sales folks in computers and two Nerd Herders over at Geek Squad] it's exactly the same laptop [same specs, chip, MB, same amt of upgradeable RAM, size of hard drive, etc], but the case looks a bit different.

So by the time they charged me the clearance price [$999], rounded that down to $900 for being the display model, took 10% off because it was on an 'open stock' sale, I just got a $1200 gamers laptop for around $850. And you add the 'I killed it by spilling stuff on it' extended warranty, the OS Backup CDs, had all the ASUS specific stuff taken off, the antivirus and all the OS updates loaded and the 'Buy-Back' warranty stuck on, I ended up spending less then I would have buying the new model bare bones.

I hope to pick up Raffi tomorrow or Sat. and will find myself having to get used to Win7, do a massive data transfer from Bella's drive to Raffi's and weep for those programs I no longer have install cd's for. But with 8GB of DDR3 RAM [upgradable to 16 GB], 1TB of HD, a killer NVIDIA GTX 560M graphics card, an Intel i7 Processor and more bells and whistles then I can count, I think I can suffer.

And I have 18 months of 0% financing to pay it off.

So yeah, I went into the financial hole on this, but I also figured it was worth getting a system that would hold up to do the things I'd want it to for the next 4 - 5 years or so. And I'm thinking it's a whole lot better to get something and start the transition on my terms rather then having Bella going HD Aloft and I *have* to try to figure things out while in crises.

It's been several hours since I signed the paperwork and I'm still in a 50-50 mix of excitement and terror.

Looking for an install disc and reg # for XP Pro, SP2 or SP3. I googled eBay and Amazon and had a stroke. I still have my husbands old laptop - a little Acer 15" - and it's got Vista loaded on it. The poor thing slugs out so badly it's little better than a door stop. I don't want to do a lot on it, mostly word processing, email and such when I travel, so I'm loath to dump a lot of funds in it. I'm running XP Pro SP3 on my main laptop and have it on the desktop [if/when I get that up and running].

Sorry folks, but I don't want to load Linux, Unix, etc. I'm just not all that experienced with them. I just want something that will be compatible with the software I've already got [and I'm already using Open Officer for my WP suite].

Anyone have any clues or hints?

The following is lifted fromrowangolightly's LJ and I'll warn you up front - it may eat your brain and cause massive amounts of time loss.

The Isle of Tune

Enjoy!

Gacked with absolutely no shame from wraithfodder.

If Microsoft ran Christmas ...

Each time you bought a Microsoft ornament, you would have to buy a tree as well. You wouldn't *have* to take the tree, but you would still have to pay for it anyway. Ornament/7 would weigh 1500 pounds (requiring a reinforced steel tree), draw enough electricity to power a small city, take up 95% of the space in your living room, and would claim to be the first ornament that uses the colors red and green together. It would interrogate your other decorations to find out who made them. Most everyone would hate Microsoft ornaments, but nonetheless would buy them, since most of the other ornament types wouldn't work with their hooks!


I'm not really sure if I want to laugh my tush off or go hide under the computer desk in terror...

2 GB isn't much these days, but enough for some things. This is a 'just in case you're interested' sort of thing. I do admit to a slight ulterior motive though - if you click the link to Mozy and sign up, I get a little bit of extra space free.

I guess it's more that I want to see if this system works. if so, I may sign up for the unlimited package which is @ $5/month.

That is all...

Had some significant problems with Bruno yesterday [my desktop comp]. Scary, bad problems. So Himself decided that today was *the* day to go in and get an external HD to use solely to back up the entire system in case things went scary bad again.

So we did. Didn't get the item today because it was out, but Office Max was more than willing to give me a rain check for it.

*It* being a 1 'terabyte' external hard drive for $139.00.

Woo Hoo!

On top of that, they gave me a rain check for 2 8 GB flash drives marked at $18.00 each.

Okay, I have no doubt I could probably find both items somewhere cheaper, but not *that* much cheaper and I don't have to rely on shipping and such.

I am a happy kitty.

Never get smug or think to yourself 'Things are going fairly well today' because that is the sure KoD [Kiss of Death]. I know this for a fact because today my email client decided to not only die but take everything with it: archives, folders, address books, the *entire* set of backups, the whole fracking bit. I've been trying since 11AM to resuscitate it and have finally decided to 'call the code' on Thunderbird. This is after countless registry cleans, compacts, reinstalls, reading countless Mozilla help files, etc. It's just gone and it's probably best I just bite the bullet and go on.

So to do that in part, I need folks to post me to I can recreate my address book. I got a *very* tiny partial save on it, but over 80% is gone. So please just reply back and I'll add you back in.

And no -I don't want to hear *any* variation on 'It wouldn't have happened if you only ...'. I'm not changing OS, I'm not going to a Mac, I'm not changing email clients, etc. Any variation of that in any reply is a guaranteed 'fail'.

Thank you.

Rowan/Jari/Seticat/

Unless someone has a *really* clever way to extract embedded graphics or something from what looks like surviving folders. I see big folders and I see some other file - *.m-something. Okay - so maybe I'm still holding out a teeny bit of hope that there may be a few grey cells left...