“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” - Albert Einstein
For those of you that are following the blog, you may be interested to know that I am writing this post from my new Latitude E4300. Overall, I am fairly impressed with the combination of speed and portability. Usually you have to sacrifice one for the other. But I will leave that review for a different post. For anyone who has purchased a computer from I.T.NOW in the past year, you will truly be amazed by my next confession. I am running Vista on my new laptop. I also must confess that this is my third attempt at converting to Vista. Rumor has it that there is currently a pool going on at I.T.NOW betting on when I will switch back to XP (email Jason if you want in on it). So why do I run Vista when I tell all of my customers to steer clear of it? I guess it is just one of the things I have to know. I can walk anyone through pretty much all functions of XP without having a computer in front of me, so it is time to achieve that same level of familiarity with Vista. That and when I try to install XP on my laptop, the solid state disk appears to cause a blue screen, in spite of how many things I have tried (and I have sadly tried several times).
So, what am I doing differently this time to ensure that I get a different result and don’t go insane? Here are a few tips for those of you who for one reason or another are on the Vista bus.
· Don’t complain about it in front of your Mac friends. They will just talk to you about the latest “I’m a Mac” commercial and make you regret your decision.
· Feed the beast. If you don’t have 4GB of memory, upgrade. If you don’t have a video card, consider adding one. If you can use a faster hard drive (10,000 RPM Raptor or a Solid State Disk), you won’t regret the price.
· Unvistafy Vista. Part of what makes Vista more secure than XP is all of the extra layers of security, which means you have to click a lot more than you would have to on an XP machine. The technician in me has to warn you that this will make Vista less secure. But you wish you had XP, so this isn’t that big of a deal. Wired Magazine has a great Wiki on some steps you can take to clean up Vista.
· Relax. In less than two years, you will get to do it all over again with Windows 7
Dell doesn’t change platforms that often with their corporate customers, so when they do, it is a pretty big deal. The seven-year-old latitude D series will be phased out by the end of the year being replaced by the E series. Here’s why I will be ordering one as soon as possible:
- Dell Latitude ONTM. Sometimes when I am traveling with my laptop, I need to get something on the internet real quick, or I need to check my e-mail. I don’t necessarily need to wait for Windows to start up to do simple tasks. Latitude ON allows you to pretty much instantly boot into a simple operating system (Linux based) to access your e-mail, calendar, contacts, or browse the internet. Since it is not using your system’s main processor or hard drive, it dramatically improves battery life.
- Style. Some people say style shouldn’t matter for corporate computers, but when it comes to laptops, size and looks count. The new laptops are around 1 inch thin, and start out at around 2 lbs. This means you won’t feel inadequate sitting next to someone using a Macbook.
- Speed. The new laptops use faster DD3 memory, faster processors, and are available with the latest solid state disk drives (sorry, I had to use a little geek speak, I am talking about a computer after all.
I am holding out for the Latitude E4300 due to be released in the next few weeks. It is the smallest Latitude available that uses full-size laptop components. This means you don’t have to sacrifice speed for size.
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