New addition to the Lab…
Mired in Virtual PC slowness, I could no longer contain energy, anxiety, and despair and subsequently purchased a Gateway 7510GX at my local Best Buy. What does this mean for you? Sweeter, thicker, and richer Wordpress themes. Elvgren should finally be IE bug free or as close as possible, AND Taft should approach the same plateau of existence and IE PNG support can finally be worked-around in the latter theme.
This also brings in some interesting caveats to doing more advanced FileMaker 7 development - most of which has, until now, been developed and implemented on the Mac side. More to come on that at a later date.
Most certainly a nice little plus is the ability to play Half-Life 2, and while many may shudder at the thought of such useless timewasting activities, it’s fascinating to see some of the small tricks great developers use i.e. the strategy of when to load a level/graphics/sounds, how to use high-res texture to create more depth in a surprisingly flat world, and the nature of how they immerse the user in the game world so well. Such things translate to the user experience in other environment, most especially design and web design, where we often try to suck people into sites for as long as possible (Flash anyone??). Regardless, Half-Life 2 is a glorious game and runs well on the laptop’s ATI Mobility Radeon x600/128mb.
Perhaps, one of the most annoying things in buying an ENTRY LEVEL Windows/configurable laptop is that so many of the components can be changed with so many other parts that you may not know what you’re getting into. I was pleased to learn that the laptop has a great 100gig hard drive, though I susbequently learned (since none of this is advertised initially) at 4,200 RPM. So far it hasn’t killed me, but it may. Gateway did well thought o put the hard drive on a sneaky drawer-like compartment so that the hard drive can VERY easily be swapped out for another. 64-bit processing should be nice, if I think I’m actually ever using it on the Windows side. 
More musings to come on some annoying Mac and Windows features…
And whomever thought of putting the Control key so far wide on a Windows laptop, should be shot.
