New toy !

Friday I headed up to the Mall to do some checking out of the sales ... and to acquire the replacement for my old laptop that's done well but put up the "I retire" flag when it lost the ability to talk to the wifi router.

I didn't actually buy anything on Friday - the main Mall shops didn't have anything really interesting (although I get the feeling I'll get a Goldfraap cd sometime soon) and the traffic was so bad that I aborted the run to the computer shops I was going to do. So the main target (new laptop) had to wait for today.

I have a couple of changes to make cos the new lappy is somewhat wider than the old one ... So I'll be heading off to the Mall again for a bigger bag. It's also a Vista machine, which is an operating system I've never used before. Looks like it's more user orientated but I'll miss the special keys on my old laptop that I used to open Email, Firefox and Messenger. What I am noticing at the moment is that it is utterly silent, which won't last long cos in 4 minutes my iTunes library will finish transferring from my old lappy :-)

If an iTunes library takes over an hour to copy over, then you've probably got too much in it. I'm hoping that I'll be able to preserve the old settings cos I don't fancy rating over 2200 songs again.

The keyboard is taking some getting used to, as it's a full size keyboard design. So my usual reference point on the right hand side of the case is being disrupted by there being a number pad there. Looks like I'm getting used to it cos I javem#t mistyped much in this post so far.

Right - 1 minute to go until I dig into iTunes, I've been watching old Star Trek Next Generation episodes while it's been copying. Got a bit more setting up to do - email, Messenger, Firefox and some of the other regular apps I use are done. Others will wait (buying Kaspersky antivirus now would cost £30, waiting until it expires on my desktop will cost £40 for the pair, with AV for my dad's machine coming free!).

And ... a little bit later - I have my iTunes music playing over the wifi network to remote speakers - result :-). Current track - Some Journey off Suzanne Vega's self titled album. Sounds good :-)

(Techie bit to finish - iTunes 8 appears to have a critical bug re: Airtunes. There's periodic breakup occurring every 30s-60s where the sound disappears. Going back to iTunes 7.6 is showing flawless playback so far - extensive research coming after I have some dinner :-)