My new laptop is here! Yay!
It’s a Dell. It has XP on it, so y’all don’t have to hear me vent about Vista anymore. Not that the venting wasn’t fun.
It’s blue, too. There were other options on the Dell site that were better priced, or offered more horsepower for the price, but they were black and boring. I wanted the blue one. Actually I wanted a pink one, but they were all out of pink, so blue had to do.
The blue one does have one bonus, and that’s a built-in webcam. I never thought I’d use such a thing but the webcam has already bought me a whole afternoon’s entertainment for the kids. They love it when we take little movies of them with our digital camera — they can hardly wait to run around and watch themselves acting goofy. I have now set up the webcam so they can sit in front of the new laptop and watch themselves acting goofy in real time. It’s a potent attractor, I must say.
And bonus!, the webcam software comes with all these fancy “effects” in which it will detect a face and then do something even goofier to it, like put it on the head of a superman and then have superman fly into a wall, or have the face change into a werewolf, or have the face wear a box of popcorn on its head. And that shit is HILARIOUS when you are five. Or three.
Or thirty-seven.
TurtleHead 
So did I miss the rest of the story about the Vista laptop that crashed? What happened?
It was dead, dead, dead. The BIOS didn’t even load (here, I am quoting , I don’t even know what a BIOS is, so don’t ask for any details!). The motherboard was apparently completely fried.
We were still inside the 14-day return policy from Future Shop so we just returned it outright. We were a little worried about data that we had loaded on it already — nothing super sensitive, but some of my email, copies of the kids’ baby books, that sort of thing — but there was no way to wipe the disk without taking it apart, and we didn’t want to do that because then we would not be able to return it, and we really did not want to keep it. So in the end we decided to just return it and hope for the best. It will be returned to Sony, who will fix it and wipe the disk and sell it as refurbished, so we are just trusting the Sony people to wipe it well and not to read about my kids before doing so.
We decided to get a new one that had XP on it, so our choices in seller were somewhat limited…in the end we went with Dell because it was super easy to order online and get an XP machine. Already we are much happier with it, although it is noticeably heavier and bigger than the Sony we had before.
Still…XP is good.