Bleak Week

This hasn't been the best week.

My small canine friend of 17 years left us Tuesday.  Seventeen good years.  The rest of the week has just been trying to figure out what to do with our lives, now that the little boss of the house is no longer here to tell us what to do.  Dog owners everywhere will know exactly what I'm talking about.

Today, a minor distraction from it all.  A little bartering and twisting, and I am now the proud owner of my first Intel Core system.  A Thinkpad T410s with a Core i5 at 2.4 Ghz.  It's a bit of a replacement for some other stuff, but that's sort of a private deal, so...  (This was sort of worked out at the same time as the Dell XPS, but I'm going to hold onto both of these systems...)

I was out for most of the day, and just got it out of the box.  It's still packing Windows 7 Professional, which I just went through the setup options on.   Yeah...

Usually I can handle Win7.  But this time around...well, not happy.  The damned thing took forever to set up, and then it wouldn't show me the wireless.  At all.  It was like there was no wireless card in the system.  I was, shall we say, not happy, as I thought I might have been conned. 

A quick trip to the Grand Packet of OS Drives, and I fired up Upup Raring.  In the few moments to boot up, everything was recognized.  Bang, there's the wireless card.  Bang, online.  I didn't even need to do the normal "play with the ALSA setup" that one normally has to do with a Puppy variant, as the sound worked without a hitch.

Needless to say, I don't have the qualms about removing Windows from this system that I had with the Dell.  I'm thinking Kubuntu, though I'm going to bounce through my options.  Until I make the final decision, this cool devil of a machine will be booting off of a USB drive.

The Dell XPS is a slick system.  (Again, you won't hear me say that about a Dell often.)  The Thinkpads 61 and 400 are pretty damned awesome.  But this is ubercool.  We're into the MacBook level of coolness here.  Lenovo definitely had a hit when they went to the thin form.  And it still packs an optical drive.  That, and the i5, puts it ahead of the X60s

So, we'll see what this baby can do.  I think this might become my work computer for the time being. 

I can definitely use the distraction.  I'm still missing my canine buddy.  He was never overly fond of the computers, as I think he thought they took up too much of my time.  And he was probably right.  But I think he would've liked this one.

At least a little...