The Lenovo

Now that I've begun to work with the X61, I can make a few comments about it, in the hopes that these will be useful to others considering a new tablet pc.
First, keep in mind that my previous tablet was a Toshiba Tecra M4, a very different animal. Both of these are machines that garnered enthusiastic reviews and that are generally much liked by their users, but some of what a person will like about one will be unavailable on the other.
The M4 is more of a desktop-replacement model: it's big and relatively heavy. The advantage of this is that there's a good-sized screen and that it has a bay where you can swap among CD/DVD drive, second hard drive, and a second battery.
I really loved having a second hard drive right there with me all the time. What I'm realizing with the X61 is that although I bought a primary hard drive that is larger than the two others combined, I tend to feel as though the programs and user files are all mixed together. In other words, ideally the user installs all the programs before introducing any user files, and this keeps things somewhat separate on the disk. But of course in real life it never works that way. You install a few programs, you copy over your documents and work on them, you install another program or two or an update, etc. Let's just say that when I tried running the defragger a day or two into the process of setting up the X61, the hard drive was already astonishingly fragmented. On the M4, with the two hard drives, most of the user files were on the second hard drive, and there was rarely much fragmentation there. Now, it's true I could partition the X61's hard drive, but past experience in partitioning drives suggests that I never allot enough space to something. It is hard to judge expansion needs for either programs or user files. Still, maybe partioning half-and-half would be OK.
The X61, being a super-light model, doesn't come with a CD/DVD drive, and the screen is small. One either hooks up an external CD/DVD drive or buys the Unibase (dock) AND a CD/DVD drive. I opted, perhaps foolishly, for the dock on the theory that it should give me more options. You can travel with the dock, in which case the whole thing weighs somewhere around the same amount as the M4. For instance, just as with the M4, you can swap out the CD/DVD for a second hard drive or battery. I thought that seemed more appealing than plugging in a second hard drive to a USB port and trying to travel. Actually, what I think I will do is put my archival TIF files onto a second hard drive. I don't need to use them very often as the JPG versions are what I use for presentations and reference.
So... on the CD/DVD and second hard drive/battery issue, neither machine is better than the other, just different. It is nice to be able to leave the weight behind.
On the screen issue, however, I find that I really miss the larger viewing area. OK, it was the screen that was failing on the M4, but that's beside the point. I don't think I would really recommend such a small screen to another art historian, but then again it depends on how a person works. I like to have a whole page of a document nicely visible in portrait mode. For instance, someone's dissertation in PDF. Large type is always nice. And when working in Photoshop, I like to have the image nice and large. One thing I do in Photoshop is add IPTC data about the images--everything I can find about about the medium, dimensions, owner, source of scan, etc. Often I've been in a hurry making the initial TIF files and am doing the IPTC data later, working from the caption that was scanned along with the work of art. There is not enough screen real estate on the Lenovo to see both the IPTC data entry screen and the scanned info, so I constantly have to move the IPTC window around to see one or another bit of the scan. I also notice that in OneNote, which I've begun to try using for lecture notes and such, I find the writing area small. Others may not find this as important, obviously. Still, I think my vote for future lightweight development would be for a bigger screen on a fairly thin laptop.
This is also significant for the keyboard. I had never understood what people were complaining about when they said laptop keyboards were too small; I assumed this was because I have small hands that find laptop keyboards comfortable. This is the first keyboard that has struck me as cramped. It's not the keys themselves, which look normally sized. I assume they are closer together. This, however, is something I expect I will get used to. For that matter, on a tablet, many users primarily use pen input, so this would be insignificant. I mainly use the keyboard, although I love having the tablet feature.
Another keyboard matter is the placement of keys. Every manufacturer, for reasons unknown to me, likes to move certain keys into its own favorite locations. On the M4, for example, I had to get used to having the Windows key up at the top of the keyboard rather than near the Shift key. Initially I hated that, but now I'm used to it and have to get used to having it in the more usual location.
I don't recall where other keyboards I've used put the Fn key (which I almost never use), but on the X61 it's right where I expect the Ctrl to be. I'm constantly hitting Fn instead of Ctrl and am learning not to touch-type Ctrl but to raise my hand and look for it.
Another thing I'm disliking on the X61 keyboard is that the Delete, End, Home, PageUp and PageDown keys are way at the top. I'm glad Lenovo stuck Insert there, since on the M4 I often accidentally hit it (another key I don't normally use) instead of Alt, but on the M4 I was accustomed to being able to touch-type Delete, End, Home, PageUp, and PageDown, and on the X61 they are really out of reach. Does Lenovo really think a person doesn't want easy access to Delete? I think all of us surely use Delete quite a bit, and I myself use the others a lot. Escape, too, is way up there, but that's a little less problematic. I use the Escape key, but apparently I always hunted for it rather than touch-typing.
A very odd thing about the keyboard is that the F keys and number keys seem to be farther to the left than on other keyboards. I use these keys a certain amount and this means I am often typing the wrong one. I use F5 and F6 a lot in Nota Bene, and when typing in Czech I need to use the number keys for the Czech characters (or, indeed, when using the French keyboard I also need to use those keys, although I try to avoid using the French keyboard since it has some weird key placements for A, Q, and M).
The X61 uses a pointer rather than a touch-pad. In theory I have no real preference; both do the job, and are vast improvements on the mouse, which is an anti-ergonomic abomination. I do find, however, that the pointer is slower to operate than the touch-pad, and requires much more finger effort. This bugs me much more than I would have expected.
Lenovo computers evidently come with a lot of security features, which I can imagine many users find a wonderful enhancement. Initially, I thought these might be a plus. I don't, however, store a whole lot of things that I would be worried about thieves accessing. No doubt there are a few things, but the average thief is looking for a laptop, not the data. I quickly found that I really, really hate having to log on to my own computer. I do not want my entire life password-protected. I have not figured out how to disable some of these protections, so even though I got rid of passwords, the computer still asks for them. I'm reminded of all those incidents at conferences where we're using someone's password-protected laptop and after a break it goes to sleep, wants the user's password, and no one even knows whose laptop it is so the session goes on hold while someone tries to find out whose laptop we're using. Other users will have a very different reaction to the security features, of course.
I've been using the X61 for nearly three weeks now, so I may be as accustomed to it as I'll get. We'll see.
On the whole, I think the design of the M4 was better suited to my personal needs, but the X61 is nonetheless an impressive machine and for the most part merely different.

I Complain

Why, I should like to know, does it have to be so insanely troublesome to set up a new computer so that it can be used approximately like the old?
Let's put this in perspective. I have been using computers for a good long time now. While not an expert in their inner workings, I am pretty knowledgeable. On the hardware side, I can take them apart and replace various parts. On the software side, I've used more programs than I care to count and am often in the position of troubleshooting not just the quirky things that go wrong for me, but fixing things on other people's computers and showing other people how to use their software more effectively. In other words, I am not one of those legendary types who mistakes the CD tray for a drink holder, or even the average user who laboriously uses a mouse to do things that are much more efficiently done with keystrokes. (How many times have I watched people at conferences slowly mouse up to the top of the screen to start their PowerPoint slideshow from the menu when all they had to do was hit F5? This alone makes me want to bang my head on a wall in irritation.)
So. When I say it is a massive pain to set up a new computer, I am not speaking as a novice.
I possess a USB cable expressly designed to transfer data from one computer to another. First, for several days I could not get the two computers to admit that they were connected. I had done everything the instructions suggested. Since that wasn't working, I started copying files onto an external hard drive and recopying them onto the new laptop. This does work, but it is time-consuming. Most of the external drive is taken up with things I don't wish to delete.
Suddenly, last night, the two computers deigned to recognize that they were attached. No doubt I did something to facilitate that, but I have no idea what it might have been. In any case, I seized the opportunity to try the LapLink PC Sync software that had come with the cable.
Now, I already owned LapLink Gold, but it is an old version, so I thought I should give PC Sync a try.
PC Sync did not impress me as being as user-friendly as LapLink Gold. It seemed dumbed-down, and usually when software is dumbed-down, it proves harder to use rather than easier. Nonetheless, I got it set up to put some of the folders from My Documents onto the new laptop.
PC Sync has a feature where, if there is some sort of conflict (the file already exists, or something), you choose how it handles this. I set it to alert me so that I could make informed decisions on a case-by-case basis, although I didn't expect to run into much if any conflict. I was startled, however, when it told me there was a conflict with a folder that I was sure I had not copied earlier. And indeed, later on I discovered that there was no reason for conflict.
The next disturbing thing was that PC Sync claimed not to be able to find certain files that I wanted to copy. They all seemed to be files whose names included Czech characters. And I take the view that if Windows allows a character in file names, all Windows programs had better be able to handle that. A regrettable number of programs, including some from Europe, don't like Czech characters.
Still, I proceeded. I spent the evening copying what I thought was many GBs of data.
In the morning, I discovered that most of it apparently hadn't copied at all, even though PC Sync claimed that it had. The files in question were nowhere to be found on the new computer. I also couldn't get PC Sync to run properly again. No matter what I did, it would claim that the other machine had already initiated a connection and that I couldn't have two connections. It would then pretend to do some checking and I would invariably have to get out of it with Ctrl-Alt-Del, which would set off various error messages.
I decided it was time to try Windows EasyLink. EasyLink also proved to be a waste of time. First, it assumes you really want to copy everything from the old computer, or so I gathered when it said this would be 124 GB and told me that there wasn't that much space on the new (250 GB) hard drive. EasyLink doesn't make it very easy to specify just what you really do want to copy. It was easy enough to uncheck My Music, but I had to dig around to find that it wanted to copy all sorts of Toshiba files onto the Lenovo. Then, when it dawned on me that I had newer emails on the new laptop, the only way I could see to exclude Eudora was to go to a whole new list of stuff. Just to be safe, I excluded the whole Program Files directory.
Setting this all up took several restarts of EasyLink, because (horrors) the program has no functioning Back arrow or button. The only way to retrace your steps is to start from scratch. This is very bad.
But, of course, worse was to come. EasyLink apparently goes into some sort of endless loop once you tell it to start copying. It will grind away for 7 hours pretending it's gathering the information it needs to start copying. It will do this even if you only select a very small amount of stuff to copy. And, on the one computer, I couldn't get it to finish exiting either. Ctrl-Alt-Del was the only solution.
I then said, well, what about LapLink Gold? It used to work very well for me. Sure, the version I have is a little antiquated, but I used it successfully on XP machines and these are both running XP.
My Toshiba promptly told me that I would need to reinstall LapLink because it was missing a necessary component. I thought, well, maybe this is why I've never been able to get LapLink working on the Toshiba...
I reinstalled. Same message. I don't know what it wants, but if reinstalling is supposed to provide it, reinstalling is not doing the job.
It's looking like I will, after all, have to do all my copying using the external hard drive.
I am not happy. I do have a journal article to revise in the next few days. Yes, I can do that without doing the rest of the copying, but I would really like to just get at least most of the copying done.

Lenovo Comes Through

The new laptop has arrived safely and the interminable process of setup has begun.
First, I should say I was impressed with the speed of delivery. I made my order by phone last Monday since the web order wasn't going through properly, and the person who handled the order impressed me as competent and thorough, but he was cautious about predicting a delivery date. I was delighted when the computer shipped within the week rather than two-three weeks hence, and when I saw that it was shipping from China, I was skeptical that it would show up all that rapidly. But it reached my building yesterday and was in my hands this morning.
I hadn't quite expected it to be so small--I knew the Lenovo X61t was lightweight, but I hadn't been paying attention to the screen dimensions other than to be sure I wasn't ordering a widescreen laptop. It is definitely smaller than I had in mind, and this will take some getting used to. On the other hand, the lighter weight is delightful and, like all the reviewers, I had the immediate sensation that it was sturdily built.
Alas, getting a new computer isn't really any fun anymore because it is so time-consuming to get them usable. My plan was to load pretty much only the software I needed for academic purposes, and deal with the rest when I had a little time. Of course, this goal proved unrealistic. First, I had to situate myself at a cafe with wifi so that everything could access the internet (I was not about to try to get my Verizon DSL to work on yet another laptop after the trouble it caused on the last one--reinstalling Windows is not my idea of fun). But, stupidly, I didn't bring anything else to do, because somehow I always forget just how many hours it takes to install a relatively small number of programs, and how much staring into space occurs while this is happening.
Let's just say that attempts to install Acrobat and Photoshop, which must be two of the slowest-installing programs in the history of the universe, caused two of the dreaded Blue Screens of Death and I still haven't persuaded the laptop to eject the second CD because it is convinced, despite several reboots, that something is using it.
Ah well. Office 2007 installed slowly but without a hitch, Lingea Lexicon caused no trouble whatsoever (and I do use it all the time since I don't care to lug around a big Czech dictionary), and, frivolously, I did get iTunes installed although it has no relationship with my work unless we count its ability to play all those Voskovec and Werich songs.
But I regret to say that since Sunday I have been suffering from what Kristen might call a "malaise," although it is more tolerable than the one that has bothered her. Tolerable or not, I really don't care to be plagued with disagreeable joint and muscle aches, or to feel as though I have been stretched beyond endurance and ought to be lying in bed reading a diverting novel. After all, I have a journal article to revise by the end of the month.

Computer Shopping Is Annoying

Now that Spring Break is here, I've had a little time to ponder the inevitable new laptop. The one I have has continued to be (somewhat) usable, but the screen can be pretty hard to read and randomly changes color and brightness. Another user informs me that in his/her case, this proved to be due to motherboard failure. Well, that was hardly what I wanted to hear. My last laptop died of motherboard problems, only in that case they masqueraded as hard drive trouble. I really don't claim to understand anything about motherboards except that they don't seem to be replaceable on laptops.
After a good deal of hunting around and reading of reviews and suchlike, I decided that the Lenovo X61t sounded like just the thing. It has excellent reviews and people describe it as both light and sturdy. To be sure, there were difficult decisions to make: Vista or XP Tablet; an external CD/DVD drive, or the "unibase" that allows you to pop in CD/DVD drive, second hard drive, second battery, blah blah blah. The fact that I do have a second hard drive inclined me toward the unibase, although come to think of it I don't know what size hard drive it fits, only that it's a SATA connection and I'll have to look up whether my second hard drive is SATA or PATA. (I knew when I bought it, but my memory has only recorded the pondering of SATA versus PATA, not the result.)
Part of what led me to the Lenovo was the fact that I can get a significant student discount. My attempts to order the thing online, however, have been a complete failure. Never mind a few small problems, the main thing seems to be that Lenovo objects to shipping to an address different than the billing address.
Well, I can understand their caution, but then why can't I change the shipping address to match the billing address? Every time I try to do this, the whole thing stops dead. This is ridiculous. What if my billing address were a P.O. Box? No one ships to a P.O. Box. What if I lived in a notoriously insecure building? Fortunately, we have pretty good package handling here, barring one incident in which the package never showed up.
I suppose I will have to call in the morning and complete the order by phone. I really just wanted to get the whole thing over with so that they can start building the thing and ship it out.

Computers Are Weird

I should give up on trying to understand computers. After spending Friday morning happily (if somewhat frantically) slaving away at perfecting Chapter 1 (since the first and last chapters of a dissertation generally get whipped into shape last), my advisor indicated that the weekend would be a fine time for me to stuff chapters under her office door, as she'll be in there freezing anyway--I suppose scanning more images for next week's classes. I went off to look things over over lunch and prepared many more revisions.
Settling in at my carrel to continue work, I was confronted with the laptop refusing to finish booting. The hard drive was very active, but I had no clue what it was up to. Ctrl-Alt-Del had no effect. Neither, it seemed, did hitting the off switch. I had never heard of such a thing--manually shutting off a computer is always supposed to work, isn't it? After ten or fifteen minutes of this, I opted to unplug the laptop and let it run down the battery. After about an hour, during which I leafed through several library books and decided they could be returned, the laptop shut down in a very slow version of the normal shutdown.
I let it sit for another ten minutes or so, then plugged it in and started it up. Since all of this just seemed strange beyond words, I decided to do a full antivirus scan.
This kept the laptop busy until 6:00. I was astonished to see that the screen looked perfectly normal the whole time, and wanted to know why it had to be all dim and blurry when I was working but vibrantly clear while the antivirus program was running and I was reading library books and editing on paper.
No viruses were detected.
The screen has been beautiful ever since (although it might, of course, die as soon as I write this). I thought we had a hardware problem here, not a software issue. Are we simply dealing with some sort of divine joke?
Ah well, I will continue to work until 3:00, when we have a gamelan rehearsal in preparation for tonight's concert in the neighboring metropolis of Greensburg. With luck, I will not be the embarrassment of the ensemble.

Counting Down

I took the laptop in to the tech people Monday morning, and it was duly diagnosed with a hardware failure. Our tech people don't work on hardware. The technician assured me that my data was in no danger and given that I was hoping to turn in my dissertation on Friday, suggested that I simply hook the laptop up to an external monitor for the next few days.
Of course, a person doesn't exactly lug an external monitor around. Not even the new flat-screen kind. The desk upon which my external monitor sits has no room for sheets of paper, let alone a laptop. In other words, the desk I set up so optimistically in the fall hasn't proved very useful for much beyond a little web surfing and greeting of fellow bloggers.
I went into a period of mild meltdown. Where was I going to work? How was I going to get anything done? (It was, however, only a mild meltdown. Even though Kristen claims it is about the worst she's seen me get, I can melt down much, much further. There just isn't much about grad school that prompts me that way, so it has been a good many years since I really lost it for any length of time.)
Laptop or no laptop, I figured that no matter what my mental state, I could make a little headway on my illustrations, which I had printed out the night before. I imbibed some soup and settled down to my task and got quite a bit done, despite an (otherwise pleasant) encounter with our gamelan leader in which he assured me that it's cheaper to get a new laptop than to fix an ailing screen.
Later in the afternoon, it occurred to me that just because the screen was preparing to die on me, it was not actually dead yet. I might actually get a few more hours' use out of it. And indeed I got several hours of work out of it that very evening. Consequently, I'm now regarding it as something that is a tiresome problem but not likely to explode or something in the next couple of days.
My advisor, meanwhile, was very sympathetic about this kink in the dissertation process. We have agreed that I will get done what I can, when I can, and depending on when that is, I'll either graduate this spring or next year. She reiterated that my CAA paper had been a success, and that I had even kept to my time limit, unlike some people. I will not recount the horrible tale she told about a certain panel that I did not attend, which involved someone who had no concept of the importance of adhering to one's time limit. My readers can imagine for themselves the possible dire consequences, although I will say it didn't sound as though any fruit was thrown; I'm not sure anyone had any fruit handy. I am glad to say that, in contrast, everyone on my panel behaved very professionally. (I am slightly sorry I missed the debacle of which she spoke, as many horrible things went wrong throughout, but I was enjoying a perfectly good panel in another room.)
In any case, it is still conceivable that I might manage to turn in the first half of the dissertation on Friday and the second half on Monday or Tuesday. Thus, in the throes of optimism, I settled down to work quite early this morning and went at it for four or five hours experiencing that peculiar elation that assures me that I am still madly in love with the dissertation. I realize it is abnormal, but there is nothing quite like settling in at an engrossing project and feeling (no matter how erroneously) that time is of no account and that nothing else could possible drag one away from the whole thing.
Of course, at a certain point I realized that I needed to print out my chapter, that I was hungry, and that the women's restroom at Kiva Han was out of order. I prepared to depart, only to discover my friend Chip reading a strangely untoward-looking tome at a nearby table. In other words, it had nothing to do with Russian avant-garde theater. It looked suspiciously like a social science text of the most impenetrable sort.
Chip confessed it was for a pedagogy course, and made clear that he would rather talk to me (even about my recent haircut) than read any more of it just then.
An hour or so later, we had established that he should learn Uzbek before improving his German, that my roommates are much easier to pet than his, that it would be a stretch for him to claim to be "diverse" on the grounds of being politically left of center (although if he had multiple personalities, I think he could claim to be, euphemistically, "diverse" provided some of the personalities weren't straight white males), and, finally, that neither of us actually believes any of our students dream about us in the form of dreams about rats and that neither do we care if they do, even if it is psychologically damaging to them to dream that we are rats. We enjoyed contemplating the paradox of pedagogical theories that we may in one respect quite agree with and in some other respect regard as utterly mistaken.
In contemplating whether he could avoid going to class, where his roommates would be sure to mention that he had seemed perfectly healthy at breakfast, I proffered the advice that rather than weakly disagree with some minor aspect of the day's topic, and raise suspicions of moral laxity, it would be far better to foment revolution and propose a diametrically opposed approach to teaching, which at the end of class could be revealed as a mere devil's advocate position.
In other words, rather than meekly agree that it is important to maintain firm boundaries between teacher and student, which must never be crossed, it would be much more stimulating to argue that there should be no boundaries whatsoever between the two. Learning is continuous! Everything the teacher does or says is potentially a model for the student! Students should be encouraged to be with their instructors 24 hours a day, following them in and out of the shower, imprinting like Konrad Lorenz's geese. To adapt a phrase current in my father's day, we must teach The Whole Student (it used to be The Whole Child, but college students are usually past childhood)! Attractions between student and teacher should be encouraged; think of Heloise and Abelard! (Well, minus the castration episode.) While Jane Gallop did run into a bit of trouble kissing grad students, this hasn't impaired her career and we suppose that if nothing else her grad students have improved their kissing skills. Chip's students could learn to dress with the same elegant abandon that he does, strewing buttons effortlessly in the street and appearing at meetings in the striking equivalent of his talismanic holey sweater.
Ah, the value of taking a break from one's dissertation! I was much refreshed despite having eaten no lunch. I marched off to print the chapter, devour a burrito or other substantial feast, and get another couple of hours' work in before gamelan.
The gods do, however, smite those who enjoy life too freely. It took an hour and a half to get my printout, gobble down a couple of bagels, and race to gamelan. And while my voice was in good shape to tackle "Mandi madu," the brain began short-circuiting on every piece in our slendro repertoire. There is probably some special torment in hell awaiting incompetent saron players.
My roommates do, however, believe that my needs are best served by spending the evening petting them rather than trying to eke out a few more lines of the introduction. They are probably right. Rabbit massage is healthful for everyone concerned.

Back From CAA

I have returned safely from CAA, and can state that my panel went pretty well despite technical difficulties (not directly related to my own). We had a gratifyingly decent-sized audience for the last panel of the last day, and all of the talks were (I thought) interesting.
My laptop, however, is not in a good mood, and this rather takes my mind off all the positive aspects of the conference and even away from the pleasure of having lunch with my friend Deanna (who was in Pittsburgh for a conference simultaneously with my being in Dallas for CAA; I did get to take her to a few of our Nationality Rooms and she got very excited about all the Masaryk memorabilia in the Czechoslovak Room).
But, as noted before, my laptop screen began acting peculiar Wednesday morning, and intermittently showed a sort of pinstriping that made things a bit blurry and hard to read. This evening I was all settled down on the couch working on the illustrations for my dissertation, as after getting up at 4 am I was hardly in a state to work on the text. Things were just getting nicely underway when the screen dimmed and the pinstriping went to a faded yellowish hue. This has happened a few times before and seems to go away upon rebooting, so I rebooted. My Sibling had reminded me that there are various diagnostics one can run, and so I began to search for where those might be, when the screen took on the interesting appearance of an oil slick.
I decided to shut down the laptop entirely, let it cool off, and see if I could find out anything online using the other computer.
After roaming the internet, I'm really not sure what exactly is wrong. Could it be the video card? Could the inverter be on its last legs? Could it be some entirely other problem? Inquiring minds want to know. My dissertation is due Friday, I have many hours of work ahead of me to make this deadline, and for various reasons it would be a real problem to try to do this without the laptop. Not impossible, but very troublesome.
I am not at all happy.
I will say, however, that when I came home Orion was very happy to be petted and Calypso Spots licked my hand. It is nice to be appreciated by the lapine population as well as by the conference-going crowd.

Your Personal Computer Shopper

My Sibling and I spent most of Wednesday engrossed in the task of upping the Parental Units' technology. We agreed with blog readers who assured me that it was time to give in and get a new computer.
As my parents have never done anything very complex with their computers, and have given up using the laptop on trips, we decided that a low-end desktop machine would suit their needs. At the same time, we didn't want to make it so low-end that we'd have to replace or upgrade it right away. We have learned that RAM, for example, is not a good place to be modest and thrifty. We did think, however, that as hard drives are not too hard to upgrade, and will always provide more storage for the money the longer we wait, we could start off with a more modest hard drive. I was ready to go for 500 GB but My Sibling, who is less extravagant, persuaded me that 250 GB would do for now, especially given that we plan to get an external hard drive to go with it.
We were determined to have a flat-screen monitor, since the typing table my parents use is rather small. We also didn't want to take up space with a mouse (or have to re-teach its use), so we hunted for a keyboard with a touchpad and found something from Adesso that we thought looked pretty good. (If we like it, I could be tempted to get one for my own desktop! Then again, when my desktop computer is ready for replacement, I may just stick to laptops.)
We didn't bother with speakers, warranties, or other extras (if my father wants to listen to Deutsche Welle or Český Rozhlas, he can use the headset). But, since we didn't think Word 97 would work very well with Vista, we went ahead and got Office 2007.
Dell's website allows the buyer to maneuver very nicely from one of their pre-configured versions through a wealth of customizations, so while this took awhile to do, we were able to discuss each aspect as we went along. Overall, we made very few changes to the basic Dell Inspiron 531s package, but we think we will all be pleased with the result (at least for the next few years).
Once we had gotten that taken care of, we embarked on the task of finding the right slide/film scanner. More on that to come!

Why I Don’t Yet Skype

Skype is a technology well known among the recently well-traveled, but which does not seem to be making much headway among stay-at-home Americans. In brief, if one has Skype—which is free to download—one can make free calls to other Skype users, merely by getting on the internet and plugging in a headset. In other words, you can call anywhere in the world for the price of a local call.
The difficulty seems to lie in getting people on the other end to get with the program. True, we can pay the Skype people a little to call ordinary telephones, but why would we want to do that when Skype-to-Skype is free?
Several people have assured me that Skype works splendidly and that they use it all the time to call husbands in Italy or friends in the US, but I have yet to experience this (though in part because I only recently received the password for my new cheap internet service). Weeks ago, when Jesse got internet access, we decided to test our Skype skills, as presumably this would be easier between Prague and Brno (same time zone) than transatlantically. We plugged in our headsets. We went online. The connection was made. … and then it broke off. And was made… and broken off. After about twenty minutes of this, we decided that there were some technical difficulties on the Brno end. As far as we can tell, these relate to the type of internet connection there, which is a little unstable.
It seems clear that I can use Skype from my apartment, but since everyone I know who has it is nearby, I have not yet experienced a Skype call that lasted more than two minutes, and if that’s all that a call is going to last, there is not much reason to use Skype. Skype is for leisurely conversation, not “Hi, I’ll be over in half an hour.”
So if you register on Skype, let me know or I probably won’t call.