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So after a lot of thought and deliberation, I decided that it was high time I joined the laptop party. I will admit to some measure of jealousy when seeing Nick and Mike with theirs, my Pocket PC just wasn’t cutting it for goofing off in class. I needed something with more juice. I ordered a reasonably tricked-out Dell Inspiron 700m. After some coupons, free upgrades, and what have you I ended up with the following configuration.

• 1.8 GHz Pentium M
• 512 megs of ram
• 60 gig hdd

All said and done, it came out to almost exactly $1200.

It showed up today, fully two weeks sooner than Dell had estimated. While I don’t mind them leaving a little wiggle room in their estimates, it was pretty disheartening when I first ordered it. I left work as soon as I found out and proceeded to skip my afternoon class while I removed all the crap that comes on a Dell. Right now it’s running XP Home, not a big deal in and of itself. However, there’s a bunch of Dell stuff that I can’t remove so I’m thinking of just reformatting the entire thing and tossing XP Pro on there.

Oh yeah, some pictures.

This thing is TINY. I was worried that the keyboard was going to be a problem, but it’s work out really well.

I decided to give the Microsoft Virtual Desktop powertoy another shot. I’d played with it in the past and always found it pretty sorely lacking. It looks like things have improved immensely. It now includes the ability to have different backgrounds for each desktop, as well as supporting easy hotkey switching between them. The other big new thing is that it will now only display applications for that desktop on the taskbar. No more fighting to figure out which app is on which desktop and accidentally moving them. Hooray!