bed, bath, and blogging!

i'm sitting here happy as can be. i'm typing semi-blindly because i finally went to have my eyes checked tonight and my pupils are still a bit dilated. anywho, aside from the excitement of getting new glasses and having new contacts that don't burn the hell out of my eyes, i'm also happy because i've been using winxp on my laptop all day without a hitch. its strange to be so happy about that, but i'll elaborate a bit. i recently purchased an hp tx1327cl (more generically the tx1000). at its heart is a pretty neat amd turion 64 x2 tl-58 which runs at 1.9 ghz. its a dual core laptop, so its kind of like having 2 processors if you have it setup right. i upgraded to 4gb of pc5300, although a 32bit system will only recognize about 3gb. anyway, pretty much all laptops these days are coming with some version of windows vista. this particular laptop came with the 32 bit version of vista home premium (they make it sound so appealing, eh?). the first sticker i removed was the windows vista sticker, however i did give it a shot for several months. in the end it just wasn't cutting it.

actually within the first week i was dual booting vista with amd64 ubuntu linux. unfortunately this laptop isn't as linux friendly as some of the other hp laptops i've used in the past. the most annoying thing is that i couldnt get the power management to work properly. so, after some time i looked into installing winxp pro again. today i am happy to report everything works. it is a shame that hp doesn't support xp on this laptop officially (of course it would totally rock a gazillino times more if they officially supported linux).

my main problem with vista is that it is a resource hog. it seems like with just opening messenger and a few webpages i would easily use 1.5gb of memory, which is crazy. also, the operating system itself uses quite a bit of disk space. oh, and my bluetooth adapter wouldn't work. partition magic wouldn't work either. et cetera et cetera et cetera.

i tried installing the 64bit version of xp first. apparently the performance with premiere (video editing) has something like a 40 percent improvement...or maybe it was 60? i can't recall, but it was something drastic. unfortunately xp64 is pretty much a pointless system because apparently hardly anybody makes drivers for it.


i installed xp pro (regular 32bit) and its great. right now i have notepad, dreamweaver, photoshop, firefox (with several tabs and playing music), and outlook 2007 open and i'm using slightly under 500mb of ram. what does that mean? well more resources are available for anything that needs it. i suppose its like back in the day when my family had 2 identical jet skis. we'd floor it, and i'd go faster than my dad...presumably because i weighed at least 100 lbs less.

i think it would be in hp (or any company's) interest to support more than just the most recent operating system. i give kudos to any company who lets their users choose. getting every feature working in xp proves to me that there is no real reason to downgrade to windows vista. actually the only cool thing i like about vista is that when you're copying files it won't totally choke if it finds an error with 1 file.

anyway, in other news...

i recently saw the movies "The U.S. vs John Lennon" and "Sicko". I really was expecting USVJL to have lots of stock footage i'd already seen in "Imagine", and was pleasantly surprised there were only a few things i'd seen before. Oddly enough these 2 movies have something in common. Nixon!

It's amazing/troubling to know how little we are taught about some things. I feel like all i ever knew of Nixon were the blips that came out in forrest gump. Of course, that's all i still know...since neither of these 2 movies was actually about Nixon.

i feel like history has been allowed to repeat. i swear i've heard Bush say some of the very words Nixon used with regards to war. that's all i have to say about that.

well, i'm off to see if i can find a picture of myself with my most favourite glasses ever. hopefully i'll find one and then also find a similar frame when i go to the store tomorrow. i'm stoked!