Yesterday I got a new laptop… a present from work. Actually, I’ve started taking classes again and my employer hands out laptops to everyone taking classes at the open university. Nice! The laptop is a HP Compq NC6320. It was new in the box and I got a nice laptopbag to go with it. Pretty nice machine, even if it is running Windows XP Professional (not sure how long I’ll stick to that… we’ll see).
Yesterday I installed most of the stuff I need on it. The installation of windows as a drag. The installer was on the harddisk so things got started during first boot. Unfortunately there was no way I could partition the disk (i.e., to make it dualboot). Installation went rather smoothly but there’s a catch. Since the installer is on the harddisk you have to make a “restore cd”. You can only do that once during install. That sucks! And it costs about 2 hours and 8 CD’s! Damn!
After waiting for a while and switching CDs I installed Office 2003 (most of it, anyway) and installed a virusscanner, firefox, putty and cygwin (yay, running linux stuff on windows!). Things run smoothly and the laptop is nice ‘n quiet. I’m actually impressed. Tomorrow I’ll have to do some more work on it, such as install Visio, Endnote, my bridge programs and probably some more utils that I use frequently. Next month I’ll probably buy and install a Wifi-router here in the living room so that I don’t have to drag cables around. All in all: nice new toy to play with 
P.S. I’ll post pictures of the new toy in action soon!
P.P.S. every computer needs a name… my previous laptop was called Gaspode. The new one is called Animal
I am so disappointed in you….
No need to be disappointed… Linux is still my first choice. The deal is just that I have to run windows at least for duration of the classes that I’m taking. Presently trying to figure out a way to make this baby dualboot…. By the way: visio is pretty cool!