I have two major things to report, which occurred to me recently, prompting this post. My life is usually uneventful, so I trust you, my dear reader, will forgive me if these notable events are not as exciting as exploring a new country or experiencing love for the first time. Now that I think about it, these two things aren't even that incredible for the average person, but this just goes on to show how mundane and routine my life usually is.
So, I ran out of gas going to work yesterday. It was a little strange at first, because the car seemed fine (with everything running), except the gas pedal didn't do anything. The engine gradually lost speed. Luckily, I figured out what was going on pretty fast (I had stopped by a gas station earlier, but it was closed), so I put the car in neutral and cruised as far as I could, pulled over to the side of the road where there was construction going on, with cones set up, got out, walked up the street to the nearest gas station, bought 2 gallons of gas, walked back (and gratefully took up an offer for a ride back to the car by sympathetic construction folk), poured the gas in, started up the engine, and was at work about an hour later. I suppose it could have been a lot worse. Due to the holidays, the street wasn't packed with people going to work, the nearest gas station was just further up the street, and the weather was beautiful. This being the first time I pushed things a little too far though, I thought it was worth mentioning.
Next, also another first for me: I bought a laptop that wasn't from ebay. This would be the first laptop I have bought from a real store, though not the first laptop I've bought (I bought at least 12 from ebay throughout the years). This would also be the first Sony laptop I bought (a Sony Vaio S 15"er). So far, it's been a great buy for me. While shopping my priorities have been the following:
Price (reasonably priced)
Weight (<6lbs)/Size (especially height - <1in)
Display Quality (IPS) and resolution (1080p)
Discrete Graphics (something better than Intel Integrated 4000 Graphics)
Numpad
At first, I bought the Dell XPS15 (L521x) for ~$980. This had nearly satisfied all my criteria, but then I noticed a few flaws:
The display had poor viewing angles.
There was no numpad.
The wireless signal was weak at moderate distances.
But, it was a solidly built (and beautiful) machine. Inside, though, it was a pain to take apart.
Ultimately, I returned the laptop and bought the Vaio instead. While it was not as solidly built (flexible display and noticeable flex in some places), it was much lighter, and in general had none of the problems on the XPS. And I got it for <$800, so that was nice too. This does mark a new record in my laptop spending (previously held by my Lenovo/IBM X60 tablet from ~3 years ago, that I got for $500). One of these days, I'm going to review all my laptops, but for now I'll just list the ones I have had in the past:
Toshiba Portege - 3110ct, 3480ct, 3490ct, R200, R500, R600
Dell Latitude - X200, X300
Lenovo/IBM Thinkpad - X60 Tablet, X61 Tablet
Panasonic Toughbook W4
Maybe I'm just living in the past, because I find laptops to be so fascinating in that they're computers (traditionally very big), all wrapped up into one portable package.
Anyways, so the last few days, problems arose when I decided to put a SSD into my laptop (first one was the X61 Tablet, second one was the Vaio). Both of them were quite difficult in that both laptops came with special recovery partitions and software. For the X61 Tablet, I ended up going by the book, and made a set of Recovery CDs (after hours of trying to get it to recover from a USB drive). For the Vaio, I cloned the hard drive onto a SSD, and switched the two. However, before that, I had to shrink the main Windows partition on the C drive to fit in the SSD (going from a 640GB hard drive down to a 256GB SSD). Then, the computer would no longer boot up. In the end, things were fixed when I was able to mount the partition with the boot manager (\Device\HardDiskVolume3) and rename the file EFI\microsoft\boot\bootmgfw.efi to bootmgfw.efi.old and EFI\boot\bootmgr.efi to bootmgr.efi.old (basically whatever .efi there was to .efi.old). Then, I ran bootrec.exe /fixmbr, bootrec.exe /fixboot, and bootrec.exe /rebuildbcd, and all was right with the world. It was a massive headache, to say the least.
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Written on December 19, 2012