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Oct. 24th, 2008
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Oct. 24th, 2008 09:49 pmMy new mini laptop arrived last week (Asus EEEpc 1000) and, within 5 minutes of taking it out of the box, I had broken it. How? By installing McAfee on it, of course! McAfee:
a) would consistently hang the system w/in 30 seconds of boot every time;
b) refused to let itself be uninstalled.
Of course I called McAfee "tech support" (ha! I mock the use of either word) and as you can probably guess from my short posts last week about that particular company, nobody there had a fucking clue. So that left me having to manually hack it out of the registry, which mostly (but not entirely) got rid of it. Interestingly, when I went to install Ad-Aware, it detected the partial McAfee bits remaining and offered to get rid of it for me, which I happily accepted. My love for Ad-Aware remains shiny and warm.
The Asus is very tiny and, just as reviews said, has one significant flaw: a very poorly placed right-hand shift key. (I find myself constantly hitting the arrow-up key, which is where the shift key should be.) If I don't find myself getting used to it relatively soon I'm going to just remap the keys to suit me better. It also collects fingerprints like nothing I've ever seen, but other than that I *love* it so far. I haven't gotten much writing done on it yet but I have made some notes and, well, generally goofed around with the wireless. StarOffice was preloaded and wow, that's come a looooong way since the last time I gave that a try. As long as I can import/export between Word reliably without the formatting getting wonkified I may just not bother loading MS Office onto this at all.
I did take it and the sprogs to Panera today for lunch and tried to write, but between feeding myself, feeding the babies, and feeling weirdly self-conscious writing in public I didn't really accomplish much. However, as an outing I still think it was a success. Next time, either I have to sit with my back to a wall or be writing something less embarassing than a space-squid ninja story.[1]
Anyhow, it's light (3 lbs!) it's totally portable, the battery lasts forever, and, by golly, this might be just what I need. For the moment I am insanely happy with it.
---
[1] which is actually coming along nicely in the brain, but not getting transferred to an external medium very quickly. At least I've figured out how it starts; I've written whole stories knowing less than that.
a) would consistently hang the system w/in 30 seconds of boot every time;
b) refused to let itself be uninstalled.
Of course I called McAfee "tech support" (ha! I mock the use of either word) and as you can probably guess from my short posts last week about that particular company, nobody there had a fucking clue. So that left me having to manually hack it out of the registry, which mostly (but not entirely) got rid of it. Interestingly, when I went to install Ad-Aware, it detected the partial McAfee bits remaining and offered to get rid of it for me, which I happily accepted. My love for Ad-Aware remains shiny and warm.
The Asus is very tiny and, just as reviews said, has one significant flaw: a very poorly placed right-hand shift key. (I find myself constantly hitting the arrow-up key, which is where the shift key should be.) If I don't find myself getting used to it relatively soon I'm going to just remap the keys to suit me better. It also collects fingerprints like nothing I've ever seen, but other than that I *love* it so far. I haven't gotten much writing done on it yet but I have made some notes and, well, generally goofed around with the wireless. StarOffice was preloaded and wow, that's come a looooong way since the last time I gave that a try. As long as I can import/export between Word reliably without the formatting getting wonkified I may just not bother loading MS Office onto this at all.
I did take it and the sprogs to Panera today for lunch and tried to write, but between feeding myself, feeding the babies, and feeling weirdly self-conscious writing in public I didn't really accomplish much. However, as an outing I still think it was a success. Next time, either I have to sit with my back to a wall or be writing something less embarassing than a space-squid ninja story.[1]
Anyhow, it's light (3 lbs!) it's totally portable, the battery lasts forever, and, by golly, this might be just what I need. For the moment I am insanely happy with it.
---
[1] which is actually coming along nicely in the brain, but not getting transferred to an external medium very quickly. At least I've figured out how it starts; I've written whole stories knowing less than that.
