New laptop

I did a little comparison work last night and we wound up going over to Office Depot to pick up a Toshiba laptop for L. It seems pretty nice from a hardware perspective. L says she'd just as soon leave Vista on it for now, and I can't really argue, she has some experience with it from school and she'll need to work with it to some extent for the next few years, and I'm sure it'll work well enough. We can always go back to XP if we need to.

It is a total slug though. It's amazing that you can take a dual-core 2.16 GHz machine with 3GB of RAM and make it take 4 minutes to shut down on a fresh install with no software running. It's very pretty, but slow as anything.

Out of the box I booted to PING and plugged in a USB hard drive and made a virgin drive image. I uninstalled a bunch of their cruft, like the Office trial version, the Norton 360, Netzero install, etc. And then I had to repartition (using GPartEd) because they set it up as one big 250G partition (minus recovery volumes). The thing already had about 20GB used on the boot drive, so I made the final boot size 50G.

Tonight we'll install OpenOffice and Firefox and she can get busy moving her stuff from the old machine.

Holy crud!

The already bad-ass looking GM Volt apparently may be going to look even badder than that. If this comes to pass, it'll be a welcome change from the norm where a sweet looking concept car turns into a very boring production car.

GM says that at least for Europe, they're picking up the body styling from the Opel Flextreme concept car:

(and they're going to call it the Ampera in Europe)