Tag Archive for 'laptop'

Mac vs. PC

Published
by
Cody
on November 27, 2007
in Rant
. 3 Comments

The more I use Macs, the more I wonder why they’ve got such a reputation for being stable. It’s getting to the point where I hear people espouse the wonders of Mac OS and wonder if they’ve ever actually used one. Same goes for people who claim Windows crashes all the time.

I own and use a PC regularly. It’s a Dell laptop and it runs Windows Vista. What’s more, it runs Windows Vista without crashing. Amazing, isn’t it? Excuse the sarcasm, but I’ve been told a number of times that I’m a fool for using both a Dell and Windows, but I’ve never had any more problems than I had on any other brand of computer or version of Windows. Heh, I’ve actually had more problems using Macs. Anyone who says Macs don’t crash has never seen me use one. And no, it’s not because I’m an incompetent computer user who clearly doesn’t know how to use a Mac. Indeed, I get hung up on the command key (what, exactly, was wrong with the control key?) and I hate how closing a window doesn’t quit the program running it, but I know what I’m doing.

Continue reading ‘Mac vs. PC’

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Laptop action, part 2

Published
by
Cody
on April 7, 2007
in Personal
. 0 Comments

Finally, after weeks of anxiously waiting, I have been able to play with my new laptop. As I said earlier, it’s a Dell Inspiron E1505, complete with 15.4″ widescreen monitor, 256 MB ATI graphics card, 80 GB hard drive, 1 GB of memory, and a combination CD/DVD burner running Vista Home Premium. I also took the liberty of ordering an Easy Transfer cable along with the laptop to make the move from my old Toshiba to the new Dell a snap.

Contrary to what you may hear, the set up was the easiest part. I plugged it in, started it up, and ran into no problems whatsoever getting things up and running. The free trial apps included were easily uninstalled and replaced with my personal favorites, such as avast! for anti-virus (replacing the already halfway done McAfee trial), Firefox for a browser, and Office 2007 (which replaced Works 8.5, which is practically useless). I installed a few more applications so the Easy Transfer process would bring over all my application settings, and finally set about getting things transferred.

The first step in this was to install the Easy Transfer program on my old machine. Next, plug the cable into both laptops and let it get detected. Neither of those posed any problems. However, when it came to actually getting things transferred, I ran into major obstacles. The program worked fine on both computers and I was able to select what documents and settings I wanted from the old computer. Unfortunately, every time I clicked the “transfer” button after selecting what I wanted, the program worked for a couple minutes…and crashed. Only on the XP machine, however. I thought I had overtaxed it by having it transfer while it was still calculating the size of the transfer. But no matter what I did, it always crashed, making it impossible to transfer my files as easily as I had hoped.

You can imagine my frustration. I have over 20 GB worth of documents on my old machine which would have transferred very quickly over the USB transfer cable. But since the program refuses to work, I’m forced to send the files over a wireless network, which is quite a bit slower and has the added risk of failing randomly (for whatever strange reason) and mucking up the whole transfer. Hopefully it won’t, but it will still go all night if I’m lucky.

On the bright side, however, the Vista laptop is great. I’ve run into almost no problems getting things customized and installed, although the requisite User Access Control dialogs can get kind of tedious (and eye-straining due to the screen flickering they cause). I’ve yet to put any games on, but I’m hoping to do that soon to see how well it performs at gaming. I’m not expecting anything dazzling, but an ATI graphics card should put out quite a bit better performance-wise than the old Intel integrated graphics I had on the Toshiba.

More stories on how this laptop fares will be sure to follow. Hopefully it will turn out to be a nice little machine (especially considering how long I had to save up my money to buy the bugger).

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Laptop Action

Published
by
Cody
on March 26, 2007
in Personal
. 0 Comments

So I’m getting a new laptop. I just ordered it from Dell today, and it looks like it’ll be here within a few weeks. I can’t tell you how stoked I am about this. I’ve been wanting a new laptop for a while, since my current one has been getting on in years (and getting cranky at the same time). Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice laptop. It’s a Toshiba Satellite A45, but it just doesn’t do what I want it to do, which is namely games. The integrated Intel graphics don’t cut it with anything better than Half-Life or The Sims, and the paltry 512MB of memory makes it hard to do anything without having to sit and wait for it to do…nothing at all. It’s gotten worse in recent months, which is why I sprung for the Dell.

The new laptop is a brand-spanking-new Inspiron E1505. I know, it’s a Dell, and everyone tells you to stay away from them. But I’ve read not one, not two, but three separate reviews from computer magazines saying how nice the E1505 is. Besides, I got to customize it completely. Can’t do that with Sony or HP. Anyways, I managed to keep the expenses under a grand, but I just had to have the 256MB ATI graphics card to satiate my gaming needs, and the dual core processor should make for less downtime waiting for programs to open up.

The one thing I’m not liking, though, is the fact it comes pre-loaded with Vista. Now, I’ll be glad to finally get my hands on a copy of the new OS so I can see how it works for myself, but I’ve been hearing bad things about it with regards to games running horrendously slow or not working at all. This is actually not Microsoft’s fault. Instead, it’s the fault of hardware manufacturers for not getting Vista-compatible drivers out and ready for when Vista launched. As it is, most drivers are still in beta and cause a lot of compatibility issues. All things considered, I’d rather have XP Pro installed. But I think I’ll just try my hand with Vista. For every person who says Vista causes them problems, there’s another who has no problems at all. As I like to say, it’s usually a case of PICNIC: problem in chair, not in computer.

Anyways, once I get the laptop, I’ll be sure to write a full review for your viewing pleasure once I’ve played with it sufficiently

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Fiery death

Published
by
Cody
on February 27, 2007
in Personal
. 0 Comments

So, over the course of the past few days, I’ve been slowly watching my laptop’s AC adapter slowly wasting away, starting with a split in the plastic coating of a wire sometime last week and ending today with a bit of flame and a lot of smoke. At work. In a room full of people. Amazingly, no one actually saw my power supply writhing in its death throes, but almost everyone smelled the smoke. Luckily, I was able to unplug it before things got too out of hand, but not before leaving a nice little scorch mark on the desk.

This is, of course, very annoying. My laptop has only about 2 or 2.5 hours of battery life (if that), and without a power supply, I have no way to recharge. But I am not completely without foresight. As soon as I noticed the adapter really start to go south (about yesterday), I ordered a replacement part, which was just shipped out early this morning. It should get here, hopefully, later this week. Until then…well, I’ll just have to avoid using my laptop as much as I can to avoid running it down completely. Either that or risk it with the power supply, which, considering today’s events, I’d really rather not do.

The Aftermath

So, I decided to take some pictures of the ruined adapter, just to show how bad the thing got fried. My nose suffered a lot to bring you these photos…

Fried Adapter 002Fried Adapter 002Fried Adapter 002

Fried Adapter 002Fried Adapter 002

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The hard way

Published
by
Cody
on July 7, 2006
in Personal
. 0 Comments

I should learn to do backups more often… I finally fixed my computer after having completely wiping it out due to a partitioning operation gone horribly wrong. Funny story, if you have a strange sense of humor. Anyways, whatever I did screwed up my computer so bad that it wouldn’t start up at all. But luckily for me, all my files were still on the hard drive, which meant I didn’t do too bad of a job messing it all up. I still had to copy (almost) all my files off the hard drive, wipe the hard drive clean, yell at the laptop for not letting me boot off a CD, somehow manage to figure out how to boot from the CD-ROM, install Windows, install five billion Windows updates, install five billion programs, and copy all the files back onto the hard drive, only to realize that I forgot to get my fonts off the hard drive before I wiped it, which leaves me with all the uncool Windows base fonts and none of my uber-cool designer fonts that I used to make my websites look nice. But at least I saved everything else. I hope. I suppose I’ll find out sooner or later…

But now I’m back up and running, better than before, actually. It’s nice to start all over every once in a while to get rid of all the junk that builds up on your computer. But it’s a real bugger to go through. If this has taught me anything, it’s to not mess around with partitions and back up far more often than I used to.

So that’s what I’ve been up to for the past three days. Fun times, eh? I’m sure I just bored everyone to tears. I’m sorry that my life isn’t more exciting. I try, I really do. Maybe sometime soon I’ll tell you all about my gallivanting around the countryside in my Geo. Even better, right? I’d rant about something, but I’m too tired, and I’m not about to share the intimate details of my relationship with Lindsay, either. My parents read this. Savvy?

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Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States