My computer came this week. It must be a she, because it was a tease before it even got there. I was tooling around on my desktop when I saw the UPS lady pull up from my window. I stashed the dog in his kennel and met her at the door, certain that my new lap warmer had arrived.
Powered by a small nuclear reactor
Alas, I was wrong. She had me sign over for a box that was definitely too small for a laptop. I could tell right off that the poor UPS lady was having a bad day. As I began to close the door she charged back up the steps. She had forgotten to scan the package (insert lame package joke here.) The box was from Dell, so I opened it. It turned out to be my laptop backpack. It is by far, the nicest backpack I have ever owned. It has 1,576 pockets and tons of padding on the back. Vrry nice. Five minutes later, I spot the UPS lady zipping back in front of the house. I figured my digital signature didn't save or some such annoyance (does anyone's signature not look like it was written by a retarded orangutan on those things?) Lo and behold, it was a bigger box from Dell! With my apologies on the continuous of her bad day, I signed the UPS lady's scanner and closed the door once more.
This time, when I opened the box, I was greeted with a slab of high tech plastic and metal. Sleek and polished, it practically radiated computing power in its quiescence. I tenderly removed it from its cardboard confines and admired its silvery promise of the days ahead, of high-resolution, fully textured polygons, of lightning fast digital editing, of the hours we would spend with gazes locked in a symbiotic partnership of computing bliss. With a hand shaking in anticipation, I slid the power adapter home and unlatched the lid. The glossy black screen of potentiality reflected my nerdhood back at me. I didn't care. I exultantly pressed the chrome power button and descended into paradise.
Okay, okay, I took the thing out of its box and turned it on. No big deal. This thing is sweet. It's friggin' huge, quiet, and its screen is sharp as a razor's edge.
Note: screen cannot actually cutchoo, man.
I messed around on it, cleaning up some of the junk that is always present on a new computer. I installed a couple of programs like AOL Explorer and Winamp. Then, I ran into my first, and so far, only snag. I have a nice wireless network. It is based on Linksys' SRX technology, offering 108mbps to computers with the appropriate equipment. I had said equipment in the form of a PCMCIA card. I popped out the slot spacer in the new laptop's PCMCIA port. The spacer was oddly shaped.
Just like this, only people don't live on it
Shrugging, I put the spacer aside. Those of you that know your hardware already know where this is going. I slid the card in. Well, to be more accurate, I tried to slide the card in. It stopped about halfway. I grunted like Oog encountering the OoGhiJ MIQtxxXa. Peering into the slot, I could see why the spacer had the chunk missing. There was a square of plastic installed in the port and the actual connecters were sized to fit. This time I grunted quizzically in a bad Tim Allen impression. Hours of struggling with Dell customer support (hint: normal Dell support doesn't cover people that use the employee purchase program) and some savvy Internet research revealed that I did not have a PCMCIA slot. I had a PCMCIA Express slot. Riiiiight. There is not an option to order a PCMCIA slot for my computer to boot. Luckily, I couldn't deselect the built-in wireless adapter when I ordered the computer. I'm on 802.11g, which ranges from 24mbps to 54mbps. It's not perfect, but I can deal. Other than that hiccup, this new system is sweeeeet. I ran Half-Life 2 at 1920x1200 with full detail and x2 anti-aliasing. I haven't grabbed my actual fps yet, but it looks fantastic. Oh, and did I mention that it's friggin' huge?
Lacking a small country for size comparison, note the DVD in the corner
