I'm posting this from my new laptop, which is a pretty major accomplishment since it took about 12 person-hours, and the purchase of Windows XP, to make this thing actually work. The pre-installed operating system, Windows 1785 Revolutionary Edition, or whatever it was (Windows 2000 NT, if you're the kind of person who knows what that means), wouldn't let me copy over my old Outlook e-mail files, took longer to boot up than it takes warm Jello to harden (Over 10 minutes, actually. For real.), and more or less ran like there was molasses inside the machine.

But now, with Windows XP Home Edition, it seems to be doing OK.

What I should have done is listen to all of the people who e-mailed me after I posted asking for laptop advice, and spent $1200 on a brand-new, lightweight Toshiba or possibly a Sony (those were the brands most recommended by my e-mailers). Instead, my mom happened to find an IBM Thinkpad A21m (I'm just reading those letters off the case -- I have no idea what they mean) on clearance sale for $400 when she was in Circuit City one day, and we figured since my old computer was an IBM Thinkpad 600X, this would be pretty much the same except it wouldn't be dead like that one. So I saved a bunch of money, which is good. But now I'm just hoping this won't prove to be a really bad computer (as I thought it would be until I installed XP). On the bright side, it only weighs 35 pounds. (No, not really. I don't know how much it weighs, but it ain't light.)

Enough about my computer.