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The laptop came from Dell on Wednesday. It came with lots of software that kept popping up notices and annoying me, so I wiped the whole thing and installed Windows XP Pro. I spent a great portion of the day yesterday installing drivers, Windows updates (there were a ton of these), media players, instant messaging programs that I rarely use, and other miscellaneous software. It’s has a 15.4 inch widescreen LCD so the view is nice. I haven’t used the sound much but it seems to be much better than the sound on my last one. I need to make a point to test out all the ports just so I’ll know that they work.

I think I’ve decided on a name.

The LCD on my Dell Inspiron 4000 laptop that I named Excelsior went black seemingly for good last week. The computer isn’t really dead, it’s just blind. I’m sure there’s a better analogy. I think I first started having problems with the LCD last year. Somehow, every time the monitor went black, the image always came back. Since I can barely make out some stuff on the screen, I think the back light might be out. Dell wants to charge me about $400 to replace the LCD. Buying a new LCD online is only a little cheaper on the sites that I checked out. There was also another spill on the keyboard, so some of the keys are messed up again. After much deliberation I decided that it would be better to stop delaying the inevitable and just buy new laptop. A laptop is one of those conveniences that you don’t really need, but once you have one it’s a pain when you don’t have it.

I’m a loyal person and I’m sticking with Dell since they have worked well for me. I now know that I’m not as up-to-date on the newest hardware as I was a few years ago. I’m looking at the Inspiron E1505, which Dell has dubbed as an “entertainment” notebook. It should be good enough for what I’ll use it for. I think I’ll still use a desktop as my primary gaming rig, so the basic configuration on the E1505 was fine for the most part. Those who know me know that I don’t normally buy top-of-the-line when it comes to anything. I could get a “basic” notebook and save some money, but I don’t want bottom-of-the-line either. Those have Celeron processors anyway, and I tend to gloss over computers with Celeron processors.

I remember that it was October 2001 when I got this laptop (my first) and October 2002 when I got my current desktop. Somehow October has unintentionally become a significant month for me in terms of computers.

I should be making my final decision over the weekend. Hopefully, it won’t take long to receive it. I’ll have to think of a name for my new one. I think I’ll wait until I’ve had it for a few days so I’ll get to know it better.

Getting a new computer is a big deal for me, so I’ve been thinking about the other computers I’ve had in recent years:
Battleship, desktop, 1999-2002
Excelsior, laptop, 2001-2006
Hawkwing, desktop, 2002-present

I’m sure I’ll write more about it once I have the new computer in my possession.

After a recent Sprite spill on my laptop, I got it into my head that I wanted to clean the laptop’s keyboard. On Saturday I finally got around to doing it. I removed the keyboard from the laptop, removed each key, and then cleaned everything with Q-tips and water. I even made a diagram beforehand to show me where all the keys should go once I finished. It took a LONG time. If my warranty hadn’t expired a long time ago, this probably would have voided it. I think that next time I should just buy a new laptop instead.

So last week was Thanksgiving week. I pretty much had the whole week off. I did as little real work as I could get away with. After pouring more money into my car, I drove it to Jackson and didn’t have any major problems. Whenever I started hearing noises, I just turned my music up louder so I wouldn’t hear them.

Some of the highlights and lowlights of the week:

So much for beating a game within a week. I just haven’t been motivated to play any games lately. I bought Gran Turismo 4 on the PS2. It’s a good looking game, but I just haven’t felt like playing it. I got my new video card installed in my computer last week and on the same day I noticed a clicking noise coming from my hard drive. I decided to go ahead and replace it immediately. The replacement came in the mail earlier this week. Last time a hard drive started clicking, I wasn’t proactive and it ended up causing me a lot of grief. Anyway, maybe now I’ll start playing Everquest II again. Or maybe I’ll play a game that I can actually finish.

Ok, I’m starting to hate technology. Last night when I was playing Everquest 2 I noticed that my computer was making a lot of noise. I decided to shut it down until I felt like trying to figure out what was wrong. Today, the first thing I did was clean the fans, but that didn’t help. During the day I remembered that my previous video card starting making a similar noise after I had it for a while. That was when I decided to buy my current card. I took my current card out and started the computer without a card and it is SOOO quiet. I hope that it actually was starting without the card and the silence didn’t cause me to mis-diagnose the source of the noise. The card that I have now has always been a little loud, but not this loud. I blew as much dirt as I could off of it, but that didn’t help. There may not be anything wrong with the card, but the noise is annoying.

I miss having Kris around with his 20,000 spare parts. I could just pop in a spare video card and see if everything is ok. I guess I’ll just buy a new one and hope the problem is solved. I was thinking about getting a new card anyway.

I’m thinking about getting a new video card. I haven’t been keeping up with what’s going on in that market recently. I want to stay under $300, but I also want good performance. I think my best bet is a Geforce FX 5700 or a Geforce 6 6600. My current card is an Asus card, and I really like it.

I finally got my desktop machine up and running again. Since I had been getting a lot of random crashes over the previous few weeks, I decided to do a repair on Windows a few days ago. During the installation process, I kept errors that always repeated when I restarted Windows. After thinking things over and trying some suggestions, I finally decided to wipe the drive clean and reinstall Windows. Luckily, I was able to get the important data off of the drive. Now that I had taken care of that, I could finally play my new game that’s been sitting around unopened for a week: Doom 3.

Doom 3 seems like an awesome game so far. I’ve only played through the first few missions. It looks great. My only complaint is how dark the first area was, but I’m sure they meant for it to be hard to see. I was worried that my system wouldn’t handle the game so well, but I haven’t had any problems. The people that say this game is scary aren’t kidding. I’m eager to try it out online even though I’ll probably get beaten.