October 25, 2007: The Pru

It is a cold and dreary day here in Newark. We opened the windows yesterday evening and the apartment is now sixty-five degrees. Oreo is sleeping on his fleece pillow bundled in his hand knit blankets. He will barely get up at all today, I imagine.

Today I registered for my winter semester class at RIT. I had been hoping to take another programming course but the one that I need next is not available until next semester (spring) so I am taking my Project Management course instead.

Dominica had an interview this morning and she has a late team meeting this evening so Oreo and I will be left to fend for ourselves for dinner.

Oreo set a new record for sleeping in today. He didn’t get up until after four thirty in the afternoon! Boy was he hungry and ready for a walk by that point.

Dominica’s new laptop came this afternoon. She got an HP 6515b AMD Turion64 X2 and a docking station so that she can comfortably use it as a desktop as well. This laptop came with Windows Vista Business 64. (It actually comes with the choice of 32 or 64 which is very nice.) But since I tend to be forward looking and since the AMD processors are native 64bit I wanted to move forward with the latest version of the OS. So we will see how Vista 64 fares on the laptop.

This is rather exciting as this is our very first Windows Vista machine between us. We have both played with Vista on Josh’s new laptop a few months ago and I have run Vista in a virtual machine but that is very different. This will be our first time joining Vista to a Windows Active Directory structure and actually setting everything up.

It actually took me several hours to get the laptop setup and ready to use. The initial Microsoft / HP setup process is very long indeed and if it seemed long on this extremely fast laptop I can only imagine how involved the process must be. The initial “startup” of Windows Vista took about ninety minutes. The following, pointless “backup” by HP’s own software took an additional hour for something that I just want to remove anyway. Then it took another forty-five minutes to uninstall worthless advertising that HP installed onto the machine for me (PDF Complete, Trail Version of MS Office 2007, Roxio something or other, etc.) It was almost ten before I was able to attach the laptop to the docking station and see it on the real monitor.

My very first real issue with Vista is that they made it that when you select “power down” all it does it go into a suspend mode and leave partial power on without offering you choices as to what you want to do. Of course, I wanted to “power down” like any reasonable person because I wanted to unplug the power supply and move my laptop. I didn’t have the battery in yet because I only keep the battery in while running off of battery or recharging so that I don’t ruin the battery. So, of course, I crashed Windows because it isn’t designed to lose power in suspend mode.

As soon as I put the laptop into the docking station and recovered from the crash I fired up the desktop monitor but the monitor selection applet failed and couldn’t properly extend the screen to the second monitor. So that wasn’t very impressive. It eventually worked but only after turning the feature on and off a few times first. Then it was on to Internet Explorer and the very first page that I went to caused it to crash. So we aren’t off to a very good start.

Today is the opening day of “The Pru” or the Prudential Center here in downtown Newark. Of course, Eleven80 didn’t manage to get the scaffolding down nor the side street cleared so it is still a complete mess down here. Not that that wasn’t expected though.

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