Before I turn all geeky, however, I want to thank folks again for helping out with Relay for Life. I haven’t heard yet from our team leader on how much we raised overall, but I do know that our Miss Relay contestant (who, sadly, came in second) single-handedly raised $420 in one hour. He was dressed as Marilyn MANroe. (Last year he was Daisy Dude and took first place.) The first place Miss Relay wasn’t nearly as cute, but he was part of Team Honda. Car builders have deeper pockets than lab workers, I suspect. 🙂

So, what’s all this about a new laptop, you ask? Well, if you’ve been following via Twitter, you know the bulk of it. Basically, it goes like this.

A month or two ago I was looking hard at laptops to replace my poor ol’ Averatec laptop. I had a series of specs, including dual core and under $500. But nothing came close. So I decided it wasn’t the time.

Then for her birthday, Amy asks me to research a travel laptop for her and contribute (if I could/was willing) toward the purchase of said laptop. No problemo, I thought. So I did some searching and when I was doing Free Comic Book Day this Saturday, I stopped into Best Buy. And damn, there it was! The laptop I’d been looking for! 12″ screen or less? check! Dual core processor? check! Under $500? check!

But I didn’t buy it there. Instead, I got the specs and headed home to do some research. And discovered that Best Buy actually had a great price for it. I called Amy to let her know that this laptop would meet her specs and then some. She decided to check it out and wound up ordering it the next day from the website. Supposedly the price was going to go back up (and might have in store), but the online price was still $379.99. I kept sitting on it, but finally Monday I caved.

When I ordered it, it wasn’t going to come in until Friday at the earliest. But when I checked the tracking number today, it was OUT FOR DELIVERY! Woot! I basically ran to the door when the UPS guy showed up. (He faked me out & sped by the door originally. But must have u-turned and drove up to my door. Woo!)

So I charged it and have been installing software. Waiting until I hear from Amy before uninstalling shit. We can have an Uninstall Party over the phone. Heh. (Is there something wrong with me in that I downloaded Firefox before I downloaded the firewall/AV?)

Speaking of AV, I ran Comodo after installing and updating it. And it found two infected files! Brand new computer and it comes with viruses. They were both from a Wild Tangent game, which is one of the many reasons I NEVER install Wild Tangent willingly. (That program used to be a real PITA when I was the computer tech at school.)

Anyhoo, this laptop will become my WebDev machine. I’ll share my D drive on the main PC and install my Adobe WebDev Suite on here (after deactivating it on my main PC). Hopefully now it won’t dribble to a crawl when I’m running Skype, Dreamweaver, and Firefox at the same time like my poor Averatec did.