New laptop

Hmmm . . . we're off to Mallorca for a few days in an hour or so's time. And my wife has bought a rather nice new Sony Vaio laptop - the third or fourth we've had over the last few years. And, this morning she asked me to 'load the software' - what ever that means.

The consequence is that I haven't yet packed - it will only take a few minutes and I'll only forget a couple of important things - but I have spent several hours 'loading the software'.

The trouble is that I haven't loaded anything very interesting so far - I've been unstitiching or updating the default installation. All manner of things that we don't want, free this, trial that offer of the other. Yet, Windows & Office - both pre-installed took an hour of installation including three re-boots to get up to date. This computer was delivered to the store on October 3rd so it isn't exactly old - no more that 6-8 weeks from manufacture is my guess. So why four or five months of updates?

I've created two DVD's of System Restore files - that took an hour just to burn the DVDs; taken out Norton Security Suite, added ZoneAlarm Pro (just because it's OK and I know it well); added my favourite Directory Opus 'DOpus' file explorer; added Microsoft's AntiSpyWare beta - why wasn't that pre-installed (it found one 'severe' warnign in the pre-installed software; replaced the free trial of MS Office with a licensed copy; added a basic instal of FireFox.

I've added sharing to the network - re-set the the network name to get it talking to the rest of our computers here. And right now I'm using DOpus to sync all my wife's My Documents folder over.

Six hours on and the system will just about be minimally set to take with us, when I get back then I can start putting some real software on there and taking off the rest of the demos to create some space.

Bob