New Laptop (Dell D620) and a new blog reader

23 Oct 2006

Last week the IT guy at work (whom I’ve helped out previously and have a good relationship with) asked me if I’d be interested in being a guinea pig for some new laptops.

Being the technology-inclined person that I am, I agreed. Don’t get me wrong, my previous laptop wasn’t too bad, Dell d610 w/ 2gb ram and a 2ghz centrino but after using it for a year it was probably time for an upgrade. Hey! I benefit a lot more from a faster laptop than a sales guy would…. right?!?

Turns out that Dell doesn’t make the d610 anymore and has since replaced it with the d620 and it’s bigger cousin the d520 (I say bigger b/c in order to get a SXGA+ decent resolution you have to go with a 15″ model). Unfortunately for me, Dell also decided to go wide-screen with the d620 which isn’t quite as ideal for coding as the 4×3 ratio’d d610 was. The resolution is still decent at 1440×900, and on a 14.1″ display, I wouldn’t want to go much higher.

All in all, I’ve been using the laptop for a few days now and I’m happy without much in the way of complaint. The 2.16ghz Core Duo is noticably faster. Despite the 14″ display, I suspect it should also game fairly well as well (sshhh it’s work-related of course).

The other half of this post regards my switch from Bloglines to the latest incarnation of the Google Reader. Although I’ve been a Bloglines user for a few years now, I’m particularly fond of its Google IG integration and what I consider to be an improved navigation scheme. For example, In Bloglines whenever I loaded a feed, it was flagged as read… with the Google Reader only the posts that I click on are marked as read with the added ability to easily mark all posts as read. This became a pain as I switched back and forth between PCs or browser windows.

It was an easy migration from Bloglines, opml export/import, and I find it a more powerful offering. That being said, I’ve only been using it for a week or so and I haven’t exactly taken the blinders off yet. I’m sure a migration back to Bloglines would be just as easy.

I also took the pluge and re-installed the Google Desktop suite on the new laptop. I ran a few of the initial betas but have been in the dark since. Needless to say I’m pretty pleased with it as well. The ability to hit CTRL twice and have a semi-transparent search box pop-up is worth the price of admission itself.

That’s enough for now…