Jen gives in to my constant whining..... awesome!

Well, after listening to my whining for about a year, Jen decided to get me a laptop for my birthday. She let me pick it out for myself and pretty much gave me free reign. Of course, I got some input from her because I have a hard time making up my mind between options sometimes.

I ended up getting an HP zt3000 with all kinds of tricked out stuff. Let's see: Pentium M 705 with all the Centrino wireless stuff, 512 MB RAM, 64 MB ATI Video, the best screen possible (1920x1200, awesome), 30 GB harddrive, blah, blah, blah. It's got some great features. An SD card-reader, S-video out, wireless, DVD drive, etc. It's a widescreen format, which made it a bit on the heavy side (6.5 lbs), but that's okay.

I'm really going to enjoy using it. Actually, I already am. Jen and I do a little bit (okay, a lot) of TV watching so it's nice to be able to chill out on the couch and surf the net or check email while we watch the Olympics or whatever. I'm looking forward to testing it out in class this fall. I'm taking two CS classes so it will be nice to have that with me.

So far I've only encountered two drawbacks. The first one has nothing to do with the computer. I can't take the laptop into work with me. I don't really care about that, except that I have class directly after work so I can't go home. In other words, I have to leave the laptop in the car. So it could get stolen, or it could bake/freeze depending on the weather. That sucks, but there's nothing I can do about it.

The second drawback is apparently a pretty common problem with LCD screens. There is a dead pixel right in the middle. That sucks, especially since I paid an extra $100 to get the "good" screen. It isn't covered under warranty because there are less than 7 dead pixels (just one). I could return it but I hear it's a common thing. I don't really notice it doing normal stuff, just when I watch a DVD or during boot-up. It actually doesn't bug me outside of those times. I'm still deciding whether or not it's a deal-buster. Other than that I love it though.

So, add another tool to my "tool"box. I'm such a geek. My next project is turning Jen's old computer into a Linux file-server, with aspirations of being a web-server later on. We'll see how that goes.

Later.