So I’ve been gone a piece. It takes awhile to migrate everything over, which is the pain of a new computer. But oh…the joy.
So my aging laptop has been retired. And in its place, this lovely Lenovo Y500 IdeaPad. It is a gamers laptop, and it is heaven. Nice i7 core, 8gb ram, 16gb/1tb ssd/standard hard drive so it boots instantly. And best of all – not one, no, but TWO Nvidia GeForce 750m’s, purring in tandem.
My birthday gift from my lovely wife – who hovered like a vulture over the Lenovo outlet site for days, camping for a leet drop like it was 1999 and she was logged into Everquest.
The downside of course, beyond the mentioned migration, is getting used to Windows 8. I have found it to be – well not as bad as I feared. Its definitely different, with some strange design decisions that make absolutely no sense, but its not terrible. Like – why is the shutdown button hidden in the “settings” menu?
But, I think I have it all set up and all my relevant files moved. The last thing that’s been a headache is my RSS reader. I use Bamboo, which is an addon for Firefox and built into the browser, but I have discovered, much to my chagrin, that while it does have a great “import” feature – it has no commensurate “export” feature. And I’m lazy, so I’ve been putting off the process of re-inputting the insane number of feeds I am tracking in the old browser.
But the graphics…oh the graphics. Tanks is a joy to behold, running at max quality and 55 fps. Rift is beautiful, now that I can render more than 100m in front of my character. Even Everquest II shines like it never has before.
So I’ve been in la-la land, and transfer land. But tomorrow, its return to posting land, and boy do I have some posts. We are going to talk about why lore can never be player generated, and why EQN was the most ridiculously misleading pimped and reveal of the decade (so far). And, by jove, there will be some beautiful screenshots. I can promise you that!
Harbinger Zero 
Gratz!
Congratulations!
I’m more of a desktop person myself, but I see that a lot of people these days are happy with gaming laptops. They sure seem to have a come a long way from the ones that were sold 5+ years ago.
Thanks! Re: laptops – yes they have. Our desktop beast we bought a year ago, but there is a space issue since the only location we have for it is my wife’s office (she works from home apart from her business travel), and so its often already occupied between her long hours and side photography business. So instead of a cheap work laptop, I ended up with this monster… (-:
Windows 8 does have a bit of a learning curve, and I may be in the minority here… but I like it. I do agree that hiding the shut down in settings is an odd choice, but it IS still before the first major update (coming in October). So a lot of little things like that will hopefully be fixed. Once I really learned to use it, though (the Windows-key on your keyboard is really useful now), I find it so much more efficient than even Windows 7. Slow adoption rate, people not liking the change, and the anti-Microsoft crowd are really holding it back, imo.
Yeah, having had almost a month of time under my belt now, I’ve come to appreciate some of what they have done. It does take a little more time and effort to set up to get the most bang for your buck, but once you’ve done it, its nice having everything you want right at your fingertips.