Sunday, September 21, 2008

New Laptop!!!

EDIT: I have the new G. laptop.

And the winner is... a Toshiba! 3G RAM, 160 G HD, DVD RW. 17" monitor - it's actually bigger than the TV we have in our camper!

Now I just hope I can elbow enough people out of the way to get one at Best Buy this morning...

Heh. It's amazing how the sea of computer geeks parts when a 6' tall shaved head biker walks up to the entrance. Actually, I kid. Some geek even stepped on my foot on the rush in and I even refrained from re-arranging his facial bone structure...

(Side note: How hard is it to set up a computer these days? Look for much cursing in Casa del G...)

Still working on setup. It appears I'm stuck with Vista, at least for now...

((Side note2: Should have a review of the GOAL Heritage Banquet later today. A good time was had by all, but I had a first...))

That is all

6 comments:

DJK said...

It's easy. If you need someone to help with anything...that's easy too. Gotomeeting or logmein gets another person on there in a hurry and you can watch. I'd be happy to help, if'n you ever need it.

But, it's super basic. Just remove all the crap the dealer/manufacturer put on there and go.


Pretty easy.

Rustmeister said...

Yeah, the biggest downside to a new computer is all the unnecessary crap installed on your new baby.

Jay G said...

Thanks djk and rustmeister.

I've done it before, but like a zillion years ago...

Think I'll give it a whirl. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

[cue maniacal laughter...)

Andrew C said...

Start off by running PC Decrapifier, should help clear out the junk.

Jay G said...

It appears that both the setup of the new 'puter and installation of the wireless network went off okay.

How do I know if my network is secure?

Sigivald said...

Vista's fine - don't believe the hype.

What djk said - just uninstall the horrible things that they all preinstall, and there shouldn't be a problem.

(The only really real problem with Vista was lack of hardware drivers from vendors at rollout - the hardware folks have all caught up, especially since it's preinstalled for you.

If it's the 64 bit edition, it'll even usefully use a full 4G of ram, instead of the 3G that a 32 bit OS can usefully use on a PC*.

*I could explain why, but it's not worth the effort - but that's the reason so many PCs ship with 3G of ram rather than the 4G+ they can actually hold.)

On the wireless, set it to use WPA/WPA2, set a passphrase that isn't just a dictionary word, and you're as reasonably secure as any non-paranoid's home network is going to be.*

(* Again, you could make it more secure, but the fact that you asked us suggests that "set up a VPN on the wireless LAN" is not something you want to bother with, and the easy, built-in WPA security should be more than enough.

I don't bother with anything more than that, myself.)