My new Toshiba notebook.

Recently I got my economic stimulus check and decided to do my part to stimulate the economy and spend money! I have been meaning to get a new computer for some time now, and with me being in school figured a notebook would be nice to have. So last Friday after work I went shopping around and finally settled on some nice new toys, getting myself a Toshiba laptop with a 15.4" wide screen display. I settled on Toshiba because they are the only company still providing pcs with backup discs. Every other pc manufacturer does not, unless you want to pay for the store to do so. The companies figured they could make money when peoples' pcs got infected with virus and spyware and had no other recourse but to wipe their computer clean and reinstall Windows and need that precious copy of their OS to reinstall.

It is a one year old model Toshiba with 2 gigs of RAM, 160 gigs of HD memory, cd/dvd read/write, AMD Turion processor running at 2 GHz. I've read about the video card (an ATI Radeo X1200) and heard that it's really not that good but I am not using it for games, though I wouldn't mind putting a decent game on it, nothing really fancy, maybe Diablo II. But I got it mostly just to surf the net and be able to do school work on. If I want to get a gaming pc I'll get a desktop that is more manageable when it comes to upgrading. Anyhow the notebook cost me $550.00 (not including tax). Along with that I purchased a basic 4 port Linksys Wireless G, a wireless optical mouse and a carrying case. I also purchased a 3 year service contract that covers the battery, OS which is Vista Home Premium (ugh Vista !). Total expenditure for the day was $865.00. Nice thing is I got approved for financing, interest free for 18 months too and now I'll have a Best Buy store card with a $2000.00 limit... Mmm big screen HD TV in the future...

I spent a fair amount of time running updates as the software was preloaded half a year ago, it being last year's model. I also uninstalled junk, streamlining my computer's HD memory. I need to make a decision between Microsoft Office or Microsoft Works, as they both seem pretty similar. I just need to figure out what the differences so I can free up more space. I also have a few different media players, Toshiba's, WMP, iTunes, Realplayer, Quicktime and Creative Mediasource (for my mp3 player I got for free from work). I have all of those because different movies and songs on the net I've come across required something in particular to work. And those programs really don't take up that much space anyhow, all of them combined are something like less than 300 MBs so that's fine. I also installed Mozilla Firefox to avoid killing my pc with malware and got myself Adaware and Spybot. In a month when my trial version of McAfee runs out I need to get the free security suite one gets with the Roadrunner service, which I also get for free because I work in tech support for Time Warner Cable supporting their Roadrunner Business class customers. More on that later, I used to do tech support for residential customers...

So now I get to blog while lying in bed! Muahahaha! Okay so that is kind of sad, there are other things I'd rather enjoy in bed but I guess this will suffice for now...