Posted

May 12th 2008

Mood

Enthusiastic

Well, I finally managed it! I got myself a laptop. It's a Toshiba with the capacity to outperform my old desktop by a good margin right out of the box and bury it with a few relatively inexpensive updates. I will still be keeping the desktop because the CRT monitor is by FAR better for color matching during the print process, but a lot of the hard core rendering and stuff will now be done on the dual core processor in the laptop. Next on my hit list is a portable drive so I can yank all my critical files from the desktop and keep them on something BOTH machines can use in order to save myself hassles uploading files back and forth. I'm really wanting a terabyte drive, but I'll settle for for something smaller if I can get something decent sized fairly cheap. I've seen 180 GB drives for around $70. I could have that to spare in a single paycheck once I'm done covering the expense of getting the laptop. It's a start toward protecting all the critical art files by removing them from the desktop which has become questionable in its reliability.

I'm surprised this new laptop is running as well as it is considering the headaches it gives me trying to network it with the two Win XP based computers on our home network. This one has XP Home Premium. True to the word of some of my tech head friends, they seem to have worked out a lot of the software compatibility issues. Thus far, though, I'm really unimpressed with Vista as an operating system. The Start menu is a freaking mess. You can't just redirect a broken shortcut anymore, so if you decide to reorganize where your programs are you have to totally recreate your shortcuts by hand. Networking it with anything that isn't running Vista is a total PITA and finding where things are is a pain, too. You would think on something with ONE freaking drive and hardly anything on it, finding where a file got dropped would be easy. But no.... You have to check your hard drive AND a seperate are of "public files" you supposedly offer up for anyone using the network you're on to snag. Yeah... like anything stays there once I get it on my machine. :-p Nobody needs to be touching my damn files. *smirk*

So I'm trying to get things slowly up to speed so I can pretty much handle any art or web page task when I'm out at Apollocon or vending Pagan Pride Day or CMA Beltane or whatever. And, when I take trips up north to see my best friend, it won;t impact my work too much, either. I can sit and BS with her while I work like we used to do when she lived down here. All and all, I see this little machine allowing me to get a lot more done.