Well I’m back, and much sooner than expected. I was without a computer for about 6 days, counting the half of Thanksgiving and the half of Tuesday. I got my new computer yesterday. We were supposed to go on Monday when my mom had off, but she called late in the afternoon to say she wasn’t feeling well. Then I got a surprise call early Tuesday afternoon with her telling me to get ready to go out to Best Buy since she had called off. Her and Matt had a fight and she didn’t get a lot of sleep, had been crying, etc, so she called off. She says they’ve broken up, then says she hasn’t decided yet, but they’ve been breaking up since I was 5. At the most if they break up it’ll be a couple years, at the least a few months.

Anyway I got ready and then after I was done (an hour later, it takes so much effort now) she said she didn’t know if she wanted to go all the way out to Best Buy after all, and maybe we could go to a restaurant in Dormont instead? I said that I didn’t go through all the trouble of getting ready just to go up the street. So she managed to drag herself out and we took the street car to South Hills Village. Even though they’re overpriced, Best Buy is basically the only tech place we can get to around here, besides the Mac store in the mall near there, but that’s way out of our price range. We can only stare longingly through the windows until the sales people chase us away. It’s good we went out then because at that time she had caught me in one of my mellow moods where I can go either way, and getting out and going to the store put me into a good mood, so I was very receptive and willing to look around. I guess it was a good time, because I haven’t been in an okay mood in a while. The first one we saw was not going to happen, a 160 GB hard drive. I would only accept that if I couldn’t get anything else. She showed me a computer she had seen online, an Asus with a 320 hard drive, 4 GB memory, 64 bit, 16″ widescreen, with a webcam and facial recognition, for $480. I’d never heard of Asus, and preferred a well-known, big name computer like HP or Dell. It was also pretty ugly, so we continued to look around. Then I saw a Toshiba for $430. It had a less features, and was a little smaller, but it was much cuter and cheaper since I also needed to get anti-virus and was hoping to get a wireless router. We couldn’t afford the anti-virus that day (right now I’m using a trial of Norton, I’ll be getting Kaspersky) and decided to hold off on the router and get them at the same time. So here is the laptop I got:

Toshiba – Satellite Laptop with AMD Athlon™ II Dual-Core Processor – Graphite Gray
Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit (don’t listen to them, Win 7 sucks)
3GB RAM
320GB Hard drive (actually 288/270)
15.6″ HD Widescreen
2 hrs battery
Prettiness

I’m so shallow. The pictures on the site do not do it justice. If I had a digital camera (like this crappy but cutie that caught my eye) I would post pictures of it. I also saw these three amazing wireless mouses 1 2 3, that are so expensive but absolutely gorgeous. I love them all, especially #s 2 and 3, but I think the third one would go best with my laptop. After choosing the laptop we had a slight ordeal trying to purchase it. The guy who was checking us out (and who had been giving us advice) was kind of a jerk, and then he couldn’t accept cash and had to send us to someone else. It was then while waiting we decided to hold off on the router. While there we also looked at the cameras, netbooks since my mom wants one, and the computer games since I haven’t had any in years. I think I own two: Sim City 3000 and the first Harry Potter game. I don’t know if any new ones I’d like to buy would play on this laptop, I don’t know what the compatability is for them. So far all the previous software I had Filezilla, VLC, KMP, even Paint Shop Pro installed and appear to work without a problem.

When we were leaving I told my mom I would have to think up a new name for the computer. I had previously decided on Poj, standing for piece of junk, but since I got a “nice” one I couldn’t name it that. Since it’s a Japanese computer I thought it should have a Japanese name, but then there’s the problem of whether a computer is a boy or a girl. I started thinking through names beforehand, mostly from different anime. Haruhiko was one of them, and keeping with the H’s I really love the name Haruka. All of my computers have been boys (except maybe one) and felt that this one was too, so Haruka wasn’t an option. So I changed the ka to ko since it sounds like it could go either way. My new laptops name is Haruko. I don’t know if I’ll be able to name my network, I know on some you can, and I’d like an anime name for that as well. After sifting through some Code Geass ones, I thought it should be tech related, and what anime is more computer and internet related than Serial Experiments Lain? So if I can it’ll probably be Cyberia, the name of the club there, unless I find a different one from it. The only issues I have with the laptop so far is stupid Windows 7, which may be better than Vista, but not XP, the touchpad/mouse, the internet cord not staying in, and that I’m forced to use a screen resolution of 1366 x 768 instead of my preferred 1024×768. Everything looks so much better in 1024×768.

When we got home we stopped at McDonalds and I got an Angus Third Pounder since I haven’t had one in a while because of my throat, and was bad and had 1 1/2 pops to get the burger and fries down, since its so hard to eat with water. I’d want to try their hot chocolate too, even though I’ve never liked hot chocolate when I’ve had it. Too watery. Hopefully theirs would be different.