New baby No. 2

Finally got my new laptop, and she's beautiful! When I was researching what to get and settled on Sony, it was quite a nice bonus to discover that I could get the laptop in one of my favorite colors, a dark red -- at no additional cost! It's probably the second "cutest" thing I own next to Buster, seen here checking out his competition:

One of the main reasons I went with this VAIO -- on top of brand loyalty and trust with/in Sony -- was for the keyboard. The keys are spaced apart a bit like on a Mac laptop, which makes typing much more comfortable for me with my man hands.

When the IT guy came in to set everything up for me, I had him go ahead and install the Windows7 Beta on it so I could give 'er a whirl. I've hardly used Vista (due to lack of compatibility testing/support between our tools and Vista, we were told to stick to XP), so I can't really compare it to that, but compared to XP, anyway, I'm really liking 7. It's very slick and sharp, and has a lot of cool new features. Definitely helps that my new machine is rocking 4 gigs of RAM!

One (other) big downside of my old laptop spontaneously dying is that I had to wipe all the music off my iPhone to re-sync it with the iTunes on this new computer. Had I known my old laptop was about to bite it, I would've backed up all the music and then deauthorized that iTunes, but alas, I had no warning. Most of the music was duplicated on my iPod, but I unfortunately had a couple albums I'd bought off Amazon that I'd stored only on my dead laptop and my iPhone. So I'll have to shell out again for those.

Finally, one other cool new thing I've figured out how to do -- transfer TV shows from my TiVo to my laptop to my iPhone. As I ride the bus a lot, it's going to be so great to be able to spend the morning commute watching last night's "Rescue Me," "Real Housewives" or whatever. It took me several hours to figure out the whole process (getting files from my TiVo to the laptop was easy -- but time consuming -- using TiVo Desktop; then I had to use two additional programs to convert those files for viewing on the iPhone), but figure it out I did!