New laptop

[johnridley]

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.

Comments

[jennlk]

I don't run any active AV, and the kids share my system. I've got AVG doing a daily scan, and run AdAware once a week. I update the OS as necessary, and don't run IE or Outlook.

The first malware I've gotten since we installed the new machine (two years ago? at least), was just last weekend when the 11yo gave me Internet AntiVirus Pro, between the time that he got up and when I got into the computer room.

L's computer gets more stuff than the other systems combined, but she's also a lot more trusting than we are.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Yes, she'll definitely have AVG installed shortly.