Welcome to the newest member of our family!

After being thoroughly frustrated with the ability (or rather, lack of ability) of our household computers to play streaming video of The Office, I spent much of the day yesterday consulting with Mark about a buying a new computer.

I've been thinking about getting a laptop for a while but I kept putting it off... next thing you know I'm sitting with a PII 450 mHz desktop with a monitor that randomly turns pink and yellow and stalls whenever an MSN Messenger window opens. Mike's desktop is almost the same story and the laptop which he inherited from his mother can only run Windows 98 (which of course causes issues when you want to install anything else, even though it works surprisingly better than either of our desktop computers).

Last night I finally bit the bullet. I had a couple of models in mind that offered the features I wanted. After checking prices with a couple of computer warehouse stores, it turned out that Future Shop had the best prices. I felt a little pedestrian buying a computer from Future Shop, but laptops are a whole new category for me and I think because of how little customization you can do with them, it's pretty safe to go armed with a bit of knowledge to a so-called Big Box Store. Commissioned stores like FS sometimes give me a bad feeling of getting ripped off, partly because I'm so gullible and partly because there are a lot of sharks that work there.

I ended up spending a bit more than I wanted to originally but I walked out with a computer which happened to be on sale and was slightly better than what I needed, which is a good thing since I can't just open it up and upgrade it as easily as I could have with a desktop. Even better, they are giving me 14 days to test it out to see if I like it and they've guranteed me price protection up until January 8th! Welcome to the family HP Pavillion DV6115!



Here's where you can stop reading if you aren't insterested in the specs...

There were a lot of considerations that I mulled over during the day, but in the end I chose an AMD Turion 64 X2 Dual Core Mobile TL-52 processor running at 1.6 GHz, got 2GB DDR2 RAM (a whole GB more than I wanted, but yay!), a 100GB HD for storing lots of TV eppy's and movies, a dual-layer DVD burner, an NVIDIA GeForceGo 6150 graphics card, Altec Lansing audio, 512KB L1 Cache, 512KB L2 Cache, 802.11b/g WLAN, Integrated 10/100 LAN, WXGA High-Definition BrightView 15" widescreen, 1600MHz Bus, Windows Media Centre with FREE Windows Vista upgrade once it comes out and a tiny little remote control. Ok... so I didn't need the extra GB of RAM right away but it saves me from adding it in a few years. I also do ZERO gaming so I probably didn't need such a nice video card but I will enjoy it when I watch movies nontheless. Oh, and I got the very last box and it was completely undamaged, not even a scratch... that's kismet right there. I just need to get a TV tuner (probably from TigerDirect.ca) and I'm all set!

The only problem so far is that I can't get it to recognize our wireless network. Luckily there are other people in the neighbourhood with un-password-protected networks that I "borrowed" to update NAV and check to see that the wireless card worked. Hopefully I can get it figured out this afternoon when I'm not also trying to watch Grey's Anatomy at the same time. What an intense episode it was last night! I'm glad we were taping it b/c I need to see it again to figure out the stuff I wasn't paying attention to.

Happy Friday everyone and have a great weekend! We are planning to chillax at home for our first weekend since we got the keys. Yay! It's the perfect way to celebrate our 3 month anniversary this Sunday. :)