Friday, March 10, 2006
When it rains it pours...
Geez, the fun never ends with computers. My Sony Vaio has been having some hard drive problems, so I've been in the process of backing it up so I could reformat. In the process we decided my wife really needs a laptop to use in her home school endeavors. For the prices of an average laptop though, we decided to put a few extra bucks with it and get me a new killer machine, and let her keep the Vaio. It also solved several other headaches.
I wound up with a HP DV8135. Sweet little machine, has Windows Media Center on it, has two remote controls! A 17 inch widescreen, full size keyboard (including numberpad), 64 bit processor, gig of ram, and two 100 gig hard disks.
I got my Visual Studio 2005 loaded on it that I got as part of my VSLive package from Orlando last fall, and the new Oracle XE. Sweet, I loaded up some data and began development of a new WinForms project to produce interactive Gantt charts for work order scheduling. I was in Atlanta for a two day staff meeting and got to work on it all the way home, battery held out for the entire drive and still had 20% left.
Oh, speaking of the multimedia feature, I used the remote to lie in bed in the motel last night and watch a couple of Mythbusters episodes I had recorded onto DVD.
I've also been running around upgrading my Satellite equipment. I live out in the middle of nowhere, it's nice and quiet, but no Cable or DSL. So I have to use a satellite (Direcway) to do my internet. I upgraded my equipment, and actually have my VPN working now over the dish, which will make it much easier to work from home. On the down side it's pricy, and Direcway has no newsgroups. :-( But it's a heck of a lot better than dial up. Ugh.
Anyway, looks like this weekend will be spent reformatting the Vaio and working on my project. Next week I have three days of Wintellect training on ASP.Net. I hear it's good training, will let you know. Down side is in order to keep my project schedule going, I have to work extra. Ahh the perils of programmers.
Will the fun never end?
73
I wound up with a HP DV8135. Sweet little machine, has Windows Media Center on it, has two remote controls! A 17 inch widescreen, full size keyboard (including numberpad), 64 bit processor, gig of ram, and two 100 gig hard disks.
I got my Visual Studio 2005 loaded on it that I got as part of my VSLive package from Orlando last fall, and the new Oracle XE. Sweet, I loaded up some data and began development of a new WinForms project to produce interactive Gantt charts for work order scheduling. I was in Atlanta for a two day staff meeting and got to work on it all the way home, battery held out for the entire drive and still had 20% left.
Oh, speaking of the multimedia feature, I used the remote to lie in bed in the motel last night and watch a couple of Mythbusters episodes I had recorded onto DVD.
I've also been running around upgrading my Satellite equipment. I live out in the middle of nowhere, it's nice and quiet, but no Cable or DSL. So I have to use a satellite (Direcway) to do my internet. I upgraded my equipment, and actually have my VPN working now over the dish, which will make it much easier to work from home. On the down side it's pricy, and Direcway has no newsgroups. :-( But it's a heck of a lot better than dial up. Ugh.
Anyway, looks like this weekend will be spent reformatting the Vaio and working on my project. Next week I have three days of Wintellect training on ASP.Net. I hear it's good training, will let you know. Down side is in order to keep my project schedule going, I have to work extra. Ahh the perils of programmers.
Will the fun never end?
73
