I'm searching for a new laptop bag. After getting a backpack from Microsoft and using it on a few trips, I realize that it won't work. Since I know there are a few other people looking for them, I commissioned a review on a Maxpedition bag from the Scary DBA. I'm looking forward to seeing what he thinks of that one.
In any case, when I was trying to stuff things into my bag and struggling. So I unpacked the bag and then took stock of what I had in there. My list of things:
Wow!
I was actually stunned by how much crap I was carrying around. No wonder I didn't like carrying the backpack. I can cut down a touch of this stuff, but I'm missing my camcorder, which I'll need at PASS along with a microphone.
I definitely think that I need to consider a rolling bag of some sort.
Don't look for all this at SQL Saturday #17. I'll be there with just the netbook, leaving the 15" laptop at home.
It was not what I expected. When I was leaving for a run this morning, I decided to apply an update to Vista and let it reboot, thinking I'd defragment the drive when I returned. It was acting funny and running slow, so this seemed like a good idea to me.
I got back from the run, went to sync my Nike + run and noticed the machine was off, so I pressed power and then sat down to stretch with water thinking this would take some time. After I was done, I went to check email and noticed that the laptop was still stuck on the POST screen, with the progress bar about 2/3 of the way across.
Uh oh.
This had happened last week, just before we left, and it had me worried. I thought the hard drive had failed, but when I powered down, left it for 10 minutes, and powered up, it seemed to work fine. I thought I'd do that here. After 10 tries, I was seriously worried.
My first thought was Holy Sh*t! Here I am, on vacation, 1700 miles from home, I got that from a sign nearby :), and I have a presentation to do tomorrow. I don't even have the presentation on a USB key, because well, I'm an idiot. I do have it up on Live Mesh, so I could get it, but I needed to work on it. I also had some stuff on a USB drive, but I am by no means sure I have most of my stuff from the drive.
So I sat for a few minutes and thought about it. My best bet was probably to go get a netbook. I've been thinking about it, and it would be a good solution for a few days. I should have a service contract with Toshiba (this machine is a Qosmio F45), but they won't likely get anything done before I get home, and I have all the 411 at home, and I'm leaving for Richmond tomorrow, then back here Fri night and flying home Sat.
Luckily I have the amazing T-Mobile G1 phone with 3G and I could look up the local Best Buy. I found one on the S side of Baltimore, about 10 mi away, so I showered and packed up. Just before leaving I tried the laptop again, and success! It booted, so I hooked up my USB drive and copied over all documents, pictures, downloads, and videos to the external drive. At least I have a copy of everything. Then it was off to Best Buy.
My purchases were:
I'd asked the Geek Squad person in the store, since I knew there were ways to clone a disk drive, and he pointed me in this direction. I can use the Black Widow dock with any SATA drive, 3.5" or 2.5" and that will let me hook both drives to my laptop. From there I can boot the Acronis software and then clone my 160GB drive onto the 320GB one. Hopefully with one partition, but in any case, I'll have a working (fingers crossed) laptop.
Since I wasn't confident, and I could use a traveling machine that can be low power for presentations, the HP will come in handy. Once I have the laptop squared away, I think I'll move to Windows 7 and see how that does.
I'm afraid to clone the drive right now since I need to get a few things done, but I'll try it later and see where I come out.
My new laptop showed up today at my desk. Actually it probably showed up yesterday, but since I never went out the front door, I didn't realize it. My daughter brought it in, thankfully not dropping it anywhere, and wanted to help me open it. We did, and she got a kick out of opening everything, the box, the instructions, and more, asking me what she had to put back into the box and what she could have. Fortunately there was enough junk she could have some stuff that she wanted to play with. Somehow one of the cardboard dividers ended up wrapped for Mom. Not sure if anything else ended up there.
I charged it up before running some errands and I'd just started it up and went through the inital Vista setup, connected to the network, etc. I have Vista Home Premium on it, but it needs to be rebuilt ASAP to run either Vista Ultimate or XP. I have a Technet subscription, so I can get either one, and I'm leaning towards XP. So many people have talked about issues with Vista, runs slower, eats resources, etc. Since this will be a video machine, I'm leaning towards a slightly leaner XP.
I have to say it's a nice laptop. It has a black cover and white interior, built in webcam, which looks ok. Not the best light up here in bed as I'm messing with Vista, trying to decide what to do. I've downloaded some drivers for XP from Toshiba and I'll probably make a decision tonight or tomorrow and go with it. Unless I can come up with a compelling reason to stick with Vista, I'm moving back to XP. I'd rather have less system resources being used. The laptop has harmon/kardon speakers, including a built in subwoofer in the bottom, nice blue LED lighting, a fingerprint reader, and a Windows Media Center control, a four way joystick/enter button, that can be used like the one on a remote.
I'll plug in a DVD and see how it sounds soon. It's got HD-DVD and a DVD writer built it, so I need to get an HD-DVD from blockbuster and then plus in an HDMI cable to see how it looks.
