Posts Tagged ‘Toshiba Satellite’

DIE IN A FIRE

Saturday, December 5th, 2009

I just threw away about 6 hours of work by forgetting that Excel likes to sort just the selected column rather than the entire row. (I use Excel about once every two years, except this time it’s the first time in about four years, so excuse me for letting this little quirk slip past me.)

This was in the midst of inventorying a collection of fire bottles (“valves” to you Brits) as I carefully wrapped and packed them, so now I have to do it all over again.

This is one of those incredibly boneheaded decisions we all know and love, that made Microsoft the biggest and most influential software company in the history of the world.

The really funny part is that I almost did this as a table in Access, which I’m far more familiar with. But, no, I thought, Excel is a bit simpler, and I won’t have to waste time creating a table layout…. I’ve learned my lesson. Access would never, ever sort a given field without sorting the records it was in as well.


Ah, that other problem I mentioned, about my laptop throwing away Firefox tabs? I think it has to do with forgetting to turn off the touchpad when using an external mouse.


Here’s a funny thing about using my Logitech wireless via USB mouse with my Toshiba Satellite laptop: I have to be careful to turn the mouse off before stowing it, because if the mouse is on, any movement will cause the damn thing to wake up after I’ve put it in hibernation with the On/Off button.

Intolerable, Tosh. If I’ve pressed a button, or even clicked an icon, to put my machine in hibernation, I want it to stay there until I do something very damn deliberate, like pressing that button again.


Attention FTC: I would like to thank Linus Torvald, Dell Computers, and Kensington for their generous contributions in support of this review.

In The Lap of the Gods

Saturday, October 31st, 2009

I’m typing this on my new Toshiba laptop, a Satellite A505-S6980, which is running Windows 7.

Purchased from the Best Buy in Green Bay, WI. I undoubtably paid a premium, but frankly, I’ve never bought a laptop before, know absolutely nothing about them, and the saleslady who helped gave very good advice. I didn’t have to wait for delivery, and I got an extended service plan which covers me when I spill a drink into the keyboard or break the screen.

I also plumped for the Microsoft Home & Student version of Office, which was only $70 to permanently license the pre-installed trial version.

I’m probably going to go ahead and get the Pro version, because I need to be able to run Access. (Still far and away the most flexible and powerful database design tool I’ve tried. It might not be what I’d choose for a high-performance enterprise solution, but for my needs, it works great.) That’ll be $250 to upgrade at Amazon.

At 2.2 GHz dual core, with 4GB memory, it’s more powerful than my desktop, running Ubuntu.

Still getting used to the keyboard.

Still getting used to the touchpad. I hate touchpads, and was hoping for a clit-mouse, but didn’t see one.

I wish the display lid was a little stiffer; it flexes too easily and feels flimsy.

Win7 is pretty nice, actually, although there’s a couple of things that I haven’t figured out how to do yet. (No easy right-click way to put up a new wall-paper, for instance. Yes, I see how to do it, it’s just not quite as convenient. It seems you can’t set the display behavior of particular folders as you could in Win XP; if there’s no workaround, that’s bad. I can’t get the Details view to show me a column listing the number of files in each subfolder.)

Again, there’s probably fixes for all this; I just haven’t found them yet. And it looks like there are other cool features as well to compensate.


I don’t often drop more than a thousand bucks at a throw, and it was hungry work. I pigged out at Grazies, a local Italian place. Their “ITALIAN SAUSAGE FETTUCCINE” was perfectly spiced, excellent flavor embellished with a touch of heat. I ate too much, and didn’t have enough room for as much of their “WOOD-FIRED APPLE CRISP COBBLER” as I would have liked, but managed to stop myself soon enough to have a good lunch-sized serving to bring home.

My waitress mostly stayed out of my way and let me enjoy my food without the intrusive chatter and false friendliness that’s so common. Instead, she simply paid attention, and delivered what I wanted when I wanted it.

If you’re in Green Bay, highly recommended.


Oh, and FTC?

It’s none of your fucking business whether I got anything from Toshiba, Best Buy, Microsoft, or Grazies to write this little review, so eat my perfectly-seasoned shit and die in slow writhing agony.