Office Depot had a good deal on low-end laptops in the Sunday paper. $349 after rebate.* My sis has been jonesing for a new laptop for a really, really long time, so I told her about it.

She was ecstatic, and I went and picked it up for her. On the way into the store, my [unbe-fucking-lievably expensive] Treo 700p fell onto its head on the parking lot, and died a lingering, painful death by crunched circuits. I had stripes on the screen and could make calls for awhile using voice dial, but then it went totally black. I was devastated.

Luckily for me, Verizon was on the ball and I have a new one coming. For whatever reason, they didn’t ask me what happened to it. I had been practicing lying about the circumstances for a whole day and was a tiny bit queasy about it. Lame, I know, but I am not a good liar. Not really due to copious moral fiber, more due to not being able to think quickly and respond off the top of my head. (That’s why I like computers … they don’t care if I’m fast, they only care if I’m good – or to put it less anthropomorpologically, I don’t think fast, but I think well. Most of the time).

It’s been hard being w/out the Treo since Sunday night. Number 1 reason: I can’t play solitaire any second I feel like it. Number 2 reason: that damnable hour commute to and from Bumfuck, Egypt, where I currently reside. I’m always afraid if the car dies and I’m on the side of the road w/out a cell phone the only people who will stop will be the bad guys from Deliverance.

On a positive note, the little laptop turned out okay. I wiped it initially, leaving the recovery partition, to put XP Pro on it. I am not too thrilled by Vista yet. Particularly Vista Basic which is what came pre-installed. But the XP wouldn’t work. No drivers for the hardware. Damn! I reinstalled the factory default Vista and it was slllloooooowww, but after some video tweaking to lean toward speed instead of pretty, it perked up. Got on the network w/out problems.  Office 2003 installed on it okay. The updates for that were different and it took a few minutes to figure them out, but it all came out a’ight. And still looks nice.

Now I just have to get the damn thing mailed off to Mair.

*This one is for $200. My last Office Depot rebate of $150 took them 120 days to process. Four months. That completely sucks but it did actually arrive today. The key may be to start asking about it earlier. That seems to trigger a response. Like, “Hey, she didn’t forget about it, I guess we’re going to have to go ahead and mail the check.” Bastards.