Well, I was so tired of waiting for my MBP (yes, already) that I ran over to CompUSA today while I was on my Starbucks run, just to see if they had any in stock. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get the educational discount on it there, but I was willing to fork over an extra $200 for instant gratification.
Well, I’m not sure if I find it comforting or not, but I’m not the only one waiting for my new best friend to arrive: CompUSA only has the original Intel Core Duo-based models in stock.
Back to obsessively refreshing the order status page…
Well, I actually did it last night. In 7 to 10 days, my new MBP should ship, and 2 days after that, it should be in my gooey little hands. For those curious:
2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
2GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM-2×1GB
100GB Serial ATA Drive@7200rpm
SuperDrive 8X
17″ Widescreen Display
No Modem
I opted for the smaller hard drive because you get 7200rpm’s out of it (rather than 5400 @ 160GB or 4200 @ 200GB). I also opted for the regular display, rather than the glossy. My Inspiron has a glossy screen, and while it does look quite crisp and clear in darker areas, as soon as there’s any light around you, it all goes to hell.
If you were wondering, with my lousy $200 educational discount, I got the whole thing, including tax and shipping (I opted for 2-day, regular ground was free), the price came to $2,650.20.
I didn’t get the extended AppleCare plan. At my current rate, I’m using laptops for about 8 months, so the 1-year warranty that comes with it should be enough for me. If I’m still heavily using the MBP by the time a year is up, I’ll throw out the couple hundred extra to extend the warranty.
Continuing the series with random observations as I finish the installation and configuration of Vista on my laptop, I love the way windows fade in and out. It’s very soothing and smooth. I can’t help but notice, however, that the window prompting you if you really want to perform an administrative function (since I’m an administrator) doesn’t fade in or out like that. All of a sudden, bam, your screen is grayed out and you’ve got a new popup window in your face. I know it’s supposed to get your attention, but it seems a tad too abrupt to go with the rest of the overall theme of Vista.
Joining my domain here at home was painless - just like joining the domain with an XP machine. Since I had no physical network connection during setup, I wasn’t prompted to join the domain immediately after setup like you would be on XP. I’m not sure if this functionality exists in Vista as well, but it’d have been really nice if I’d been able to connect to a wireless network and join a domain before logging in the for the first time. Since my wireless did actually work as soon as a logged in, I don’t see why that couldn’t be accomplished. I guess you also have to consider that most comapnies running a domain are going to have some type of rollout process that will have an automated script do all the leg work. Low priority, sure, but it’d be a nice addition if you ask me…
PyClapper, for the Ultimate in Geek…
While over at Nybble Labs earlier getting the Sidebar Modules plugin I just mentioned, I noticed something insanely cool on his projects page: PyClapper. It’s a Python script that lets you launch programs by clapping…
God, you gotta love geeks with too much time on their hands…