08 sep 06
"Show us the new laptop."
this is "ask the box", not "command the box". just kidding -- i state on the index page that any sort of input is welcome. but watch your tongue, lad.
true geeks always have wires dangling off of everything.
i'm not sure what i think about that AMD processor, especially since Saint Jobs has given the "a-ok" on intel. it's fast, but not that fast. it's got enough RAM and a big enough hard drive for my purposes (i don't play "world of warcraft", and i keep my data on an external hard drive). the "emachines" brand seems a little bit AOL-ish, but i don't know; i didn't find any negative comments on the web. but most importantly, it was less than $500 -- i caught a "back to school" sale at "best buy".
helping to provide that price was a truly staggering amount of bundled shit, including AOL, mcaffee trial, MS office trial, DVD burning software trial, and things i can't even remember because i've healed the psychological trauma with a mental block. suffice to say i spent a while on uninstalling and unchecking items from the "startup" tab on msconfig. the ghosts of the processes set to run on startup are still there, in fact. let me show you:
horrible. the only ones left checked are my firewall and virus checker.
i like my windows as i like my women: stripped down (chuckle). first off, why stress the screen out at all times with a desktop color or background (unless it's skeletor)? i remove all of the xp spiffy design failures, disable a few services, set files to show their extensions and the full horde of themselves (check `c: > WINDOWS > system32` some time you feel like having your childhood ripped away), set the start menu and windows explorer to "classic view", display the full file-path in directory title bars, and i'm sure a few other things i can't remember.
oh, and i like to remove all of the desktop icons except for "my computer" (renamed "eruga", after a boss on the 8-bit nintendo game "rygar", which is also the computer's network name), and the "recycle bin". i was raised on mac, which uses the right-hand side for the trash and hard drives, and i never quite got used to the windows way. i draw the line at renaming the recycle bin "trash", which requires some regedit hacking.
after i uninstalled all the crap that came along with my emachine, i downloaded (in most cases) and installed my own standard bundle of software: firefox (browser) , photoshop (image editor) , dreamweaver (WYSIWYG html editor) , ms office (word processing, spreadsheet, and presentations), puTTY (ssh/telnet client), crimson editor (text editor), filezilla (ftp client) , gaim (multi-protocol IM client) , itunes (mp3 player), avast (anti-virus) , zonealarm (firewall) , agent ransack (local file search program) , and spybot (anti-spyware) . flash (ubiquitous web interactivity format creator) and some other installers are there if i need them, and i'll get more stuff as i go along (but probably not much). the "audacity" program (multitrack sound recording) comes to mind as a possibility.
after typing up all of those html font colors, the word "font" is starting to seem really weird to me. try saying that to yourself 5 or 10 times: font. font. font. font. font. font. font. font.
my three system tray icons represent the presence of a virus checker, a firewall, and my external hard drive. i'm considering whether or not to add "wireless connection status" -- this is my first wireless computer, and i find myself going into `settings > control panels > network connections > wireless connection` a lot.
i like to have every running process accounted for, which at this point i do. the only ones i don't recognize from my old desktop machine are the two ati2evxx.exe's, which it turns out are related to the spiffy flat-screen monitor. also, i let itunes/ipod (yes, i have an ipod -- i succumbed) do it's thing. however, i draw the line at quicktime, which encroaches if not kept in line. i refuse to install realplayer. i recognize everything, and know that it's supposed to be there. this task manager shot has all user-executed programs shut down. pain in the butt having to quit everything to take a picture for you, but again: this is what i go through in the name of art.
it's nice to have a legal windows, even if it's only xp home (as opposed to xp pro, even though i don't see any difference). it occurs to me that it might not be smart to advertise exactly what my machine is and what it's doing, but then i realize that 90% of other machines on the net are identical.