My laptop arrived yesterday and here I am tap, tap, tapping out an entry. It was more than I could have hoped for in most respects and even larger than I imagined. It's actually impossible to keep the entire screen in my visual field and I actually think of my laptop as having two 'halves' now. It's been an absolute joy so far. If I had to nitpick, I can only find two problems, both of which are probably not dealbreakers. The first is that the power cable connects on the right side of the laptop, which was sort of disappointing. I had been planning to prop the laptop up on a slant at times and the cable's presence on that side makes it problematic. The last thing I want is to put pressure on it and possibly causing the connection to wear and break. The second potential problem is the display driver for the monitor has conked out a couple of times now. Windows has always been able to re-establish it and functionally, it's just a quick fade to black and then everything's back again. I have to assume there's a software or driver problem somewhere, but I'm not overly concerned at the moment.

All in all, I've gotten out better than I could have hoped. I've been waiting for this laptop to arrive since forever. Or at least it's felt like forever. During that time I've been getting more and more paranoid about the whole situation and spent far too much time reading forums where people did nothing but complain about HP laptops and their innumerable defects. The main complaint seems to be that HP often has hardware issues that cause their laptops to be portable heaters. Everything runs ridiculously hot and causes the various parts to break down. I was worried that my laptop would suffer from similar issues but so far the temperature hasn't been a real issue. It's warmer than my Dell, but the difference based on touch seems to be minimal. Of course, I haven't really stressed the system to anything close to its limits, though I did run a couple of programs that would normally put the Dell up to 100% CPU usage with no problems. I don't think the HP even topped 35%

I've been a little concerned about finances lately, having spent way too much money on this laptop and some other things. It's not like I have much of an income and the last thing I want is to become any more of a financial burden than I already am. What I am hoping, however, is that this laptop becomes a money saving investment over time. I was spending $5-600 every year or so on a lower end laptop after all. This time around I dropped $963, or almost double, and added on a $95 3-year warranty to boot. If this laptop does make it for the full three years, then I'll have actually saved myself some cash. I guess it all depends on just how fast computer tech changes and when the top of the line moves over to obsolete.

About the only other thing on my want-list now is a RAID array for storage. A RAID system lets you basically connect up a bunch of hard drives over which your information is spread. This means that if any one harddrives dies, you can reproduce the information from the other drives. I've wanted to put one together for years now and if it weren't for the expense, I would have charged forward by now. I just can't afford it, having had to dip into savings just to pay for this laptop, my order of True Dungeon Tokens, the trip to Gencon in August, and all the event tickets I had to purchase for it. Even though Gencon itself isn't for months yet, many of those bills need to be paid now because I'm booking through priceline. It's all adding up and turning into a pretty intimidating total.

Oh well. At least I've managed to buy myself some happiness for the time being.