I have a new shiny laptop. It's refurbished, cheap, with no extended warranty. It's sporting an integrated chipset, and its "256MB" of video memory is half "Hypermemory" making my 1GB of RAM somewhat less than 1GB. I'm glad I didn't go cheaper and make it 512GB.

Still, it seems to run WoW better, at least as far as I could tell from a quick run through Shattrath City to check for lag, and to see that pretty much all my mail's been returned. Yeah, I need to play more than once a month.

It's also Vista. Which I'm not quite sure about. It seems much less stable than XP. Firefox crashes frequently (twice during this entry). I'm used to that happening almost-never. The Control Panel seems to bite it a lot, too. The "Windows Defender" is every bit as annoying as the Mac commercial makes it out to be. And coming back from hibernation takes twice as long as on the old HP. The sidebar was neat but when I saw the amount of resources it used, I opted out of it pretty quickly.

Setting up the network was a hassle. I had to set my router to broadcast our SSID long enough to get it on the list. Before I did that, it took me on an endless loop of clicking to use the existing SSID and ending back on the choose a network screen.

The control-alt-delete screen is nice in principle, but stupid in layout. Shouldn't reboot or Task Manager be the top options? Not bottom of the list or hidden in a corner?

On the other hand, it's pretty. The preview-in-window is nifty. The folder handling is really good (other than "Group By", "Sort By", and "Stack By" needing to be in the "Organize" menu and not right-click only). Nicer built-in screensavers, too.

For the computer itself, the display is a lot nicer, and I have a ton of pretty wallpapers. I've been changing it every day. I uninstalled Google Desktop but I might reinstall it and see if the gadgets from that work better for me than Vista's sidebar.

If I remember to bring the camera up tonight, I'll take a few pictures. The laptop itself is pretty, too, and much lighter. And it doesn't overheat (so far) - a big, big plus, and probably accounts for the performance boost with WoW.

Our old laptop gets dropped at FedEx to be shipped for repair tonight. It'll be Shawn's when it comes back. Snuggle while playing - YAY.