Saturday Inspiron and Vista Ramblings

No thanks to FedEx, after three delivery attempts the SOBs finally delivered my new Dell Inspiron 1525. In this day and age of a struggling economy, I cannot believe the piss poor service offered up by FedEx. But I am starting to digress …

Dell Inspiron 1525
My first Inspiron 1525 impressions is that it is a decent laptop for the price (a shade under $900). I have spent some time over the last couple of days transferring files, programs, and data from the old Dell Inspiron 6000.

I have everything almost sorted except for email. I did not realize that the Home and Student edition of Office 2007 does not include Outlook. I probably use gmail more than Outlook, but my wife is comfortable with Outlook. I guess for that matter I am as well, but I’m not sure that Outlook 2007 is really worth $90 or so dollars.

When the Inspiron 6000 started going south (IE was crashing the computer, causing Blue Screen of Death, go figure) I got my wife to switch to Opera, which could be dangerous. I have always used Opera for the naughty searches … sure my wife (probably) knows, but she never really bothered to use anything else other than IE. So switching email clients is probably not going to be a problem. Damn progressive wives make naughty searches difficult.

OK, back to the new Inspiron, it seems fast enough and plenty capable. I was a little worried if only getting 3GB of memory would be enough to keep Vista happy, but everything seems to be running smoothly. The 15″ screen is nice, crisp, displays pretty pictures, and everything is running pretty quickly. At least I have no reasons to complain yet about loading browsers, iTunes, Word, Excel, etc.

My only real complaint is that I do not like the “touch” pad style buttons for volume control. The Inspiron 6000 has real buttons on the front edge, but I guess I can learn to adapt.

Vista
I really did not know what to expect, but my first impressions are that Vista is not too shitty. If the OS does not crash then I will have no real complaints. I am sure there will be things that cheese me off, but we are still in our honeymoon period.

I have been happy playing iTunes Party Shuffle with the album covers displaying. Sounds stupid, but the Inspiron 6000 struggled pushing graphics, so I after three years we were probably missing out on some of the newer, cooler stuff. I did slog through World of Warcraft and Out of the Park Baseball, but playing sessions were often more of a choppy slideshow than a real gaming experience.

I have become completely addicted to “tagging” images in Windows Photo Gallery. Good grief! I am trying to get everything pushed to this computer just so I can sort through what is what. Bet I fill up the 250GB HDD fairly quickly.

I have never played around with Google Widgets, but I like the little slideshow widget. Of course it got me in a little hot water when a body painting of Tori Praver displayed. Oops!

Enough Vista for now. Back to tagging images. Happy Saturday!

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3 thoughts on “Saturday Inspiron and Vista Ramblings”

  1. When you say tag photos, you’re talking about putting keywords or something so you can search for them later?

    I’ve been doing that for years too. Then uploaded some to Picasa and saw that those keywords were shown as links and when you clicked on them, it showed other people’s pics with the same tags or keywords.

    Lately I’ve been trying to figure out a way to geotag my library but found out that the next version of the iPhoto application which I’ve been using has the Faces and Places feature to make tagging photos with names of people in pictures and the names of places photographed.

    The other thing that’s cool is that there’s an app. for the iPhone and iPod Touch which will control iTunes over Wifi. You can see the playlists and search for specific songs on the iPhone and then send commands to your computer to play it. If you get an Airport Express, you can hook up speakers and play anything in your library from other rooms in your house.

    I take a speaker dock from room to room to listen to the iPod every day. Sound isn’t the greatest but I can go through a lot of podcasts this way. But with this, I can hook up my old 2.1 Atlantic Technology speakers, which are actually pretty good quality. Would make it worth listening to music more often.

  2. wco81 – I am calling tagging, putting keywords on my photos. So I can quickly find pictures (Christmas, the kids, beach vacations, etc).

    This is all probably old hat to mac users, but still fun stuff for me.

    I need a new sounds system, with an idoc input and some remote/wireless speakers in other rooms so that I can listen to my music anywhere in the house. I guess that is the purpose of an Airport Express.

  3. There are more nicer systems like the Sonos, if you’re willing to spend the money.

    I don’t know about the sound quality of wireless speakers. Probably better sound than the standard speakers you get with laptops and computers.

    Airport Express has an audio out (with the mini earphone jack which you can convert to RCA audio). It actually converts your MP3 to a lossless codec and then streams it. The nice thing is the slick remote control if you have an iPhone or an iPod Touch.

    Not a cheap setup but you obviously get other uses. Sonos would cost more but if you have a huge library on one computer, I can see the appeal of being able to access it anywhere.

    I think the remote control also works with Apple TV so you can view your photos and any videos you have stored on your computer (PC or Mac) on a big-screen anywhere within Wifi range.

    I’m waiting to see if they come out with a second generation Apple TV. I tried copying some pics to an SD card and then using the slide show feature on my Panasonic plasma. My camera shoots in 16:9 so it fills up the plasmas screen nicely.

    I bought the Dark Knight and Wall E Blu-Ray and they come with a digital copy which you can put into iTunes or Windows Media. With an Apple TV, you’d be able to stream those movies to TVs other than the one where you have a PS3 or Blu-Ray player connected. Picture quality is suppose to be like DVD. Obviously you would want to watch in Blu-Ray though but it’s a nice bonus.

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