New Laptop

I bought a new laptop last week, to take advantage of the back to school sales. And I was going to write about it here, but then I ended up talking about it with a friend on Messenger, and decided to just post that, instead.

sernaferna says:
BTW, I just bought a new , too. A .

Tara - Holy crap, I bought a computer. says:


Tara - Holy crap, I bought a computer. says:
I bought a . A dell.

sernaferna says:
Nice. As I've mentioned before, I like Dell...

Tara - Holy crap, I bought a computer. says:
me too. but I bought a desktop. i'm so excited, serna!

sernaferna says:
And well you should be.

sernaferna says:
I love the new , too, but there is a bit of a problem with it:

It's an HP, and they seem to have done something strange with the partioning on the hard drive. So I may not be able to install Linux on it.

Tara - Holy crap, I bought a computer. says:
How about that umtumbu thing?

sernaferna says:
Ubuntu. That's what I wanted to install.

sernaferna says:
But HP included a *very cool* utility, with the , where you don't have to boot up to watch DVDs. You can press a special button, and it will load up a specialized little operating system that just plays DVDs (or music CDs, or, I think, MP3's or WMA's.)

sernaferna says:
Unfortunately, if you re-partition the drive, such as you would have to do for Ubuntu (or any other operating system), apparently that utility doesn't work anymore.

Tara - Holy crap, I bought a computer. says:
Hrm. So, it's one or the other. Can you add a second hard drive, instead of partitioning the single?

sernaferna says:
Not on a , unfortunately.

sernaferna says:
But even if I did... I think it would *still* cause problems..

sernaferna says:
There is a mini little program, in the 's BIOS, called the "boot loader", which decides which operating system to load up. Usually, there is only one to choose from ().

sernaferna says:
On this computer, there are 2: , or the QuickPlay thing. (Which, actually, is a specialized version of , without the UI.)

Tara - Holy crap, I bought a computer. says:
And you can't add a 3rd?

sernaferna says:
But the determines which to load; if you start up the by pressing the Power button, it loads . If you press the "DVD" button, or the "QuickPlay" button, it loads the other.

sernaferna says:
If you load Ubuntu, or other operating systems, they will replace the 's boot loader with their own. You'll then get a menu, when you load up the - "do you want to load , or Ubuntu?"

sernaferna says:
But the QuickPlay option will become toast.

sernaferna says:
Of course, I *might* give up on the QuickPlay thing altogether... If I want to watch a DVD or whatever, I'll just load up . (Or Linux - surely they've got programs that will play DVD's, and probably do a better job of it.)

sernaferna says:
It just sucks, because it was a really cool feature that HP provided, and I'd be disappointed if I'd have to give it up.

Even if it turns out to be something that I rarely, if ever, use... lol

Tara - Holy crap, I bought a computer. says:
Yeah, I don't understand the real selling point to not having to load Windows. It's not like it's that arduous of a process.

sernaferna says:
Well, I was playing around with the QuickPlay thing, and it loads up in a couple of seconds. So it *is* kind of handy.

sernaferna says:
On the other hand, the is so frigging powerful that even only takes about 30 seconds to load, so it's not THAT much of a savings...

Tara - Holy crap, I bought a computer. says:
Huh.

sernaferna says:
Please tell me you haven't closed this window...

Tara - Holy crap, I bought a computer. says:
I haven't.

Tara - Holy crap, I bought a computer. says:
Did you want part of the conversation?

sernaferna says:
Phew!

sernaferna says:
I was about to ask you if I could post it to my blog. I was *going* to write about the whole thing on there, but then I figured that, since I've already explained it all here, I could just copy 'n paste it.

Tara - Holy crap, I bought a computer. says:
Yay infamy again!

sernaferna says:
And then, of course, Live crashed my .

Didn't just crash - it brought down my whole desktop.

sernaferna says:
So, yeah, if you could send that, that would be great. lol

sernaferna says:
I'll just have to try and remember where I put which emoticons... lol

Tara - Holy crap, I bought a computer. says:
How do you want it? I can just save the txt as an rtf file?

sernaferna says:
Sounds good.