Saturday, August 7, 2010

The new machine

I ended up buying an Asus A73 for my new laptop. It's big, almost half again as big as my old Toshiba Satellite.
My wife is going to flip when she sees this thing. It's by far the most expensive thing I've ever bought myself, with the exception of vehicles, I mean. But it's sweet. 500gigs of memory (I could have gotten the upgrade to 1tb, but let's face it, I'd just be tempted to fill it with porn), 6 gigs of RAM, plus 2 gigs dedicated 100% to video. She's a Cadillac.
I bought this thing on the advice of other mariners within my company. Aside from playing online games (about 10% of all bargemen here play World of Warcraft; it's disconcerting), the computer has a lot of space dedicated to cooling, expansion slots everywhere (except for the RAM), and is the most durable laptop out there with the exception of the Toughbook. What I really like, though, are the little things in the software package- first off, the computer can be restored to factory condition at any time, should the registry get really effed. Windows 7 is still a dog, though, although this thing is helping. I'm still exploring the features, really.
My old Toshiba is a warhorse, though. I'm going to get her a new keyboard and put it back in service.
You know what's miserable? Getting your old files onto a new computer. Pictures, movies, video, documents, etc. My tax files from the past 10 years are on 3 computers. I can't consolidate. The old stuff I can toss, I know, but the files won't be readable if I copy them. End result is that I have a pile of hard drives that I've encased and made into portable hard drives... but they're ancient, for the most part- USB 1.0 connections, which meant that the 60 gigs I transferred off of the first one took an hour. I haven't even bothered transferring stuff off of the other three.
Ah well.

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