Finally

The long night has ended.

Two good events have occurred in the past week to counterbalance this annoying cough that's plagued me. Firstly, my new computer arrived on the 21st! Secondly, I am now officially done with high school.

With university approaching, I wanted a new computer. My former one, a Toshiba Satellite A70, was ... performance-challenged, to say it nicely. It was a nice computer in its own right, but clunky from the start and it did not improve. While it did what you asked, the battery life was poor, and it ran too hot. It would not make a good computer for commuting between university and home. Time to upgrade!

With Seth's assistance I went through the customization process on Dell's website and had soon ordered my own Inspiron 6400: Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 GB RAM, 160 GB hard drive. :drool: Oh, and Windows Vista. It was a tense two and a half weeks waiting for it to arrive. No one was home when the courier came, though, so I had to go pick it up at the depot. Luckily I've got a great boss who let me drop by the depot while I was working to pick up my computer before the depot closed.

So on Thursday night, my computer sat in a box on my bed. I opened it, and there it was. Shiny. It was up and running in a few minutes, although getting all of my programs installed took considerably longer. Unfortunately, I didn't pay very much attention to the Stargate series finale. :D

On Friday I transferred my personal files over from the old computer, and then everything was set up how I liked it. So far I am uber-impressed by the hardware. My battery life is around 4 hours. The fan is silent, but the computer doesn't burn my legs--it's a little hot, but all things considered, this is more than acceptable. The software, however, is annoying. Vista's interface is great, but its functions are less than robust. Just yesterday I had to boot into safe mode because in Vista Home Premium you cannot enable the Local Users & Groups snap-in for the management console. It doesn't let you. :|

Little does Microsoft know, this only motivates me to get kozier with Kubuntu. :shifty:

And now I'm done school. Today was my data management exam, which was very easy. It was my last exam, and my last time in Westgate as a student. Next year I'll return as an annoying alumnus who bothers his former teachers. :D