Inspired

The laptop arrived two days early, and I must say, its nice. Nice enough so that I won’t go into the irritation of various Microsoftisms and Dellisms, a couple of which I encountered again this evening when I went to the Dell site to ask a question. Mike, Mike, how do you do it, make all that money with such a lousy– but I said I wouldn’t go into it, and I won’t.

The laptop is nice. It’s an Inspiron 600M (I assume the name was chosen to subliminally sound like something desirable, and the number/letter to sound scientific) with Windows XP as the operating system. Its light enough so that I don’t really notice it, and though I can hear the fan running, its no where near the drone of my Thinkpad – nor near the weight, either. The keyboard has a good feeling, a little light on the touch but not objectionable. The touchpad and the two select buttons just below it are very easy to get used to, though I still prefer an external mouse. Good sized screen. A little flaky on the pop-ups, which sometimes just appear for no good reason, and refuse to go away unless you shut down the app. Strange, not crippling.

We bought an auxiliary battery with it, and were surprised to find out that it was a rather large unit that slides into the bay normally occupied by the CD/DVD drive. I don’t know if it supplies power at the same time as the regular battery, or even if it is charged – no obvious way to tell (that question was why I was casting around on the Dell site). After I sent them the email, I found a manual for the PC, buried in the materials they’d given me, but I haven’t looked yet. Time enough for that, later.

We’re running an old version of Microsoft Office. We saw no reason to buy a new bloatware tool, but we also knew that we would want the ability to look at files and documents, so this is our compromise. Its actually a copy of Microsoft Office 97 that we bought on eBay. I would say that its not one hundred percent compatible with XP – for one thing, the shortcut bar disappears every so often – but its good enough for our purposes. Installing the MS Office 97 seems to have made the OS forget what its email client was -- it won't even bring up Outlook as an default option now -- but it was easy enough to manually fix that.

Making it recognize the home network was relatively easy, though there was a goodly amount of flailing around, setting values and hoping I wasn't screwing things up in the process. I came to the conclusion some time ago that network people practice a form of guided witchcraft when they do what they do, and none of this made me change my mind. Fortunately, I had a decent hunch after about twenty minutes of 'well, let me try this' futzing around, and that was the break I needed to make it connect up. Now I can sit here and look at files on the desk PC. Thats not a big, big deal, but it is a deal, and I like being about to do it.

Sometimes XP pops up with messages and help balloons that I really don't want, and sometimes I have to just shut down what I am doing to make them go away. We'll figure it out.

We like it. We’re glad we got it.

Now, Mike -- about that site......