More on the New Toy

The new computer is still awesome, of course. I'm getting used to the setup of the laptop keyboard, so there aren't quite so many typos anymore, but it's still an adjustment. Here are some random thoughts I've had about it in the past few days:

• Man, is this thing fast. Blazingly fast. Unfreakinbelievably fast.


• The new format allows pages to load a lot more fully than on my old machine, so there's less time spent scrolling up and down, resizing windows, etc. Besides the fast processing speeds, it's taking less time to do everything I do strictly because of layout alone.


• The flip side of that is that the text is a bit smaller than before--very much so in Word docs, but also obvious in IM's and even blog posts. The question a few months ago may have been Laptop or Contacts?, but it's looking like I'll need to invest in the other half of that equation pretty soon as well.


• Did I mention how fast this thing is?


• I haven't warmed to iChat yet; I liked the control I had with AIM--window placement, familiar alert sounds, all that--but when I tried to install AIM on this machine (a version which hasn't been upgraded in two years--the same one I had on the old computer), it quit three times in a row and even detached its icon from the Dock. I guess I'll have to put up with the quirks of iChat for a little while, though I'll try to do AIM again; maybe I just had a bad download.


• As tempting as it is to just stay on this thing for hours on end, I'm almost totally set up now, so I should be spending less time on the computer rather than more (and once I get an AirPort setup, I can use it while watching TV and get twice as much stuff done at once). At this point, I have no worries about getting addicted to it, the way some people have gotten with video games.


• Before I got OS X, I felt like I was on the other side of a big chasm, since I couldn't get the coolest new software updates; they simply didn't work with OS 9. Now that I've bridged said chasm, I realize that the bigness goes both ways; not a single thing from my old computer was able to be successfully transferred. I kept my files (such as Word docs and my iTunes library) in separate folders from their original applications, and they'll work on the new software, but everything I had before doesn't work in the new OS. It really was an "extreme makeover" on Apple's part.
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• Oh yeah, have I told you how really fast this thing is?

I suppose I'm back to posting on regular topics tomorrow, but since this computer has consumed a big part of the last several days...well, that's what's in my head right now.

Oh, and thanks to all those who left comments on the Tasha post, especially the visitors from Althouse. It's still weird here without her, but it's getting better.

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A penny saved is way more than a penny earned, in this case: A tenant leader in New York who has been campaigning against drug dealers found her house on the receiving end of a bullet recently, but the damage was minimized when the bullet was stopped by a jar in which she was saving pennies.