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[May. 6th, 2009|10:26 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  geeky | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Raining On Prom Night, Grease | ] |
This post is being written on my new machine. I've named him Mike.
Thus far, it's still in the "Ooh, shiny" stages, so I probably can't give a fair and balanced review.
It's taking something of a force of will not to install all my usual apps, but I'm trying to keep it as lightweight as possible. What he has at the moment:
* The standard Windows guff. The machine comes with XP Home.
* A couple of HP-installed apps. I uninstalled the Norton trial, and HP Update, but the rest are still there. I was actually really impressed with the size of the list of apps they'd installed, which was practically none; Norton, HP Update, HP Recovery (which is, I think, how you're supposed to refresh Windows without a CD), and a burning app was about it (plus some "Hardware Diagnostic" app that I haven't touched). I didn't have to spend half a day uninstalling random programs that they thought I might like.
* Opera, instead of FireFox. Given the way I tend to hack my FireFox to hell, it starts to eat memory. And eat, and eat, and eat. I decided to resist temptation and just install a vanilla copy of Opera, though I've edited a couple of preferences.
* Flash.
* The TV Tuner drivers and application.
* AVG Free (though the updates are out of date, because our Internet is capped, so the download keeps crashing).
* SyncBack, to backup files - at the moment, it's just video, music, and pictures from Connor, but I might expand that at a later time.
I was tempted to add iTunes, but it failed my mental "Do I need it?" test - especially since it likes to add a bunch of services to run at startup. I haven't even installed VLC - I've just copied across the portable app copy.
In an interesting move, the upplied keyboard and mouse are actually PS2 (primarily so they don't use any of the 4 precious USB slots, I think). I'm not sure how easy they'd be to replace these days if they break...
He's so cute, though! I need to give him a decent backdrop soon - the default red gradient-type-thing is a bit sudden.
And now I guess I'd better go do some actual Uni work or something...
-Mmaster |
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