Yesterday I went over to Wal Mart from the motel. While there I saw that they had knocked $100 off a fairly nice HP laptop. As mine is showing signs of age and wear and has been giving me some problems I decided it was time to replace it.

So far I really like this machine. It's an HP Pavillion dv6000, had a wide screen, AMD Turion 64x2 processor, an nVidia video card, 3GB RAM, CD/DVD burner, and a 120 GB hard drive. It's a real step up from my older, more expensive Dell.

Naturally it came with Vista Home Premium. I've been playing around with it since I bought it. The Vista seems ok enough I guess and the machine is really, really fast compared to my old one. So far I haven't run into any Vista related problems, but then I've had it less than 24 hours. It did come with SP1 so perhaps many of those issues were already addressed. I'll admit that as a Linux user I don't really keep up with Micriosoft products much.

Of course I'll be repartitioning the drive and installing Linux on it, but I'll keep the Vista on part of the drive and play around with it at times. I can't wait to see how fast this baby will be running Linux.

I probably shouldn't have spent the money on it, but I do need a laptop for wiork, the price was very good, and my old one will likely be giving up the ghost soon. The battery in the old one is long gone and won't charge at all, and it has been behaving poorly for a while now. I'd hate to be stuck without one as it does make my job a lot easier.

Yeah, I could do my job without one if I had to, but it would make everything from trip planning to communications to record keeping and paperwork a lot more teadious and difficult.

I really like the wide screen 15.4" display. It should be great for playing DVDs which is another frequent use I have for it.

Ah well, I've played around with it enough for now, need to get myself ready to hit the road. I'm in AR right now and need to get on up to WI. I don't deliver up there until Monday but I want to stop by the yard tomorrow and drop off some paperwork. It's only 12 hours to the yard from here and I'll spread it out over today and tomorrow so I don't wind up sitting around for too long on Sunday.