This thing is really huge, compared to my old 15" Toshiba. It's like having a small European country of your own, except it's worth more. Despite the bulk, it's a very light machine, and quite comfortable to use. My only real question is why they crammed the keyboard into the typical "really tiny laptop keyboard area" instead of letting it expand a bit, but that's really not a huge issue for me, since I'm used to confined keyboards.
Sucker runs really hot, though. I hope it settles down a bit when running off batteries, but at the moment I think it's trying to see how long it takes to turn my thighs into barbecue.
I haven't gotten any work done, I'm slightly ashamed to admit, largely due to jumping up every 30 seconds whenever a car went by, just on the off-chance it was in fact a rogue UPS truck trying to stealthily escape my notice. Much to the disappointment of my imagination, a regular old brown UPS truck arrived earlier this afternoon and delivered the goods in the traditional fashion.
The box with the case was slightly beat up, by which I mean there was an 8" gash in the side of it, and it was oozing out entrails in the form of styrofoam packing peanuts. Triage had apparently slapped some quick packing-tape bandages on it somewhere along the line and called it good, but the delivery guy was really nervous that the package might have been destroyed. Thankfully, the laptop's box was not similarly wounded, and everything arrived unharmed.
The laptop ships with Windows XP Media Center Edition. I have no real particular feelings about that. Normally, I hack up all my machines to run server OSes, because I like the fine-grained system control afforded by an OS that assumes you are not, in fact, an incompetent slavering fool. I had forgotten just what blatantly condescending lengths XP goes to in its quest to prove that no, you do not in fact know what you're doing, and Windows should take care of everything for you. I've beaten in back repeatedly and scored a few points in the battle, but the war is far from over.
Once I get XP tweaked to treat me like a competent adult, it's time to strip off all the third-party cruft that ships on any retail PC these days. I mean, really, I don't need 3 different slideshow programs, 2 different wireless network managers, an extra volume control applet, or a crap Internet "Security Suite" from those unskilled bastards over at Norton. I just want a clean, healthy PC, thanks.
And, of course, once all the nifty little junk applets are blown into the netherworld (and the Recycle Bin has been emptied) it's time to drop a couple of games on here and see what this sucker can do.
Don't expect to see me for... a long time [grin]
