The Long Wait

I hate waiting for things. I hate waiting for a pregnancy test to be ready to read. I hate waiting in lines. I hate waiting for Christmas to be here. Most of all, I hate waiting for something to arrive. Whether it was company coming over when I was a kid, or simply for the mailman, it's always gotten on my nerves to wait for that arrival. This is amplified when I'm having to wait for a new toy. Such has been the case for the past few weeks while waiting for my laptop to arrive. Yes, that's right, I finally purchased one.

Those who know me well will recall the fact that in my ideal case, I would now be typing on a MacBook Pro. There's just one slight problem with that original plan: they're really expensive. The $1700 for a refurbished MacBook would have taken me another year or so to save up the necessary funds. For a while, I was content to wait, but then circumstances conspired against me. You see, for a few months, we had the laptop belonging to Anne's brother here while I was configuring it for their use as missionaries in Mexico. We quickly found that laptops are addictive. They're so nice and convenient. We didn't have to run all the way into the basement (a short trip, sure, but with small children in the house, you can't make a trip quickly enough) to check our email, the score of the Twins' game (usually not good), or see what the weather is like outside (because opening a window is too hard). You can imagine the withdrawal that we experienced when we finally had to send the laptop to the rightful owners to be used as it was originally intended. Now I could no longer sit on the couch and write my snarky comments. Anne couldn't email me several times a day (I really missed that). This called for drastic measures. This called for my giving up being so stubborn.

One could ask at this point, "Why didn't you go for the cheaper option of the MacBook?" Excellent question. I'm glad that I had you ask that in our pretend conversation. There's a couple of reasons that I didn't want to go for the MacBook. First, I'm not all that crazy about how small the screen was. Sure, it's really small and cute and portable, but would I get tired of looking at such a small screen? Secondly, it bothered me that they used two sticks of RAM to get up to one gigabyte. This might seem like a small thing, but when I knew that I'd want to be upgrading it to two gigs, it became more expensive to upgrade that way. Finally, and this is big for me, was the fact that it was using the integrated graphics card. I know that the integrated graphics have gotten better than they were in previous incarnations, but there's still something in me that's bothered by having such an important component of how the system performs being essentially an after-thought add-in to the motherboard. Give me something I can sink my teeth into that starts by letting me know how big the RAM is on my video card. Don't make me use the RAM that the rest of the system is trying to use. That just doesn't make anyone happy. So, I couldn't go MacBook.

Then I started to research. Price was a big consideration, but I also didn't want something that would be completely obsolete in two months. It could be a little bit obsolete, but I drew the line at completely obsolete. A guy's gotta have standards, after all. I found that Gateway was a bit over-priced. I'd heard too many friends that had troubles with Toshiba. Sony is pretty, but a bit on the pricey side. Then I looked at Dell.
The company for which I work has a deal with Dell. You can either get a certain percentage off normal catalog pricing, or you can customize one of the "company standards" to your liking at a pretty substantial savings. That's the route that I went. Oh, sure, I couldn't get my laptop in Arctic Blue (<sarcasm>Oh, no. Whatever will I do without my laptop being a "custom" color</sarcasm>) and I also couldn't get Windows Vista on the machine, which might not be a bad thing from some of the stuff I've been hearing about Vista. However, I was able to get a Core 2 processor on it, one gig of RAM (single stick), a 128 MB Nvidia graphics card (for all the heavy Diablo 2 playing), and, all-in-all, a very nice machine.

I'm going to call it Junior.

The problem was, however, I had to wait for it. When I ordered it, I got a ship date that was three weeks after the time of placing the purchase. Needless to say, it was a long time to wait for me. I started religiously checking the order status page that Dell provides because, obviously, they have too much bandwidth and need to burn some off. I mean, I was pining the thing every few minutes at one point. Then, finally, it ticked over to "shipped." I raised my hands in triumph. Then I looked at the calendar and saw that it was shipping via 3-5 day ground and we had a long weekend ahead of us. There was no way that I thought it would be here before Tuesday of next week. I was downtrodden again. But I wasn't done with surprises just yet. It seems that DHL is able to get a package from Nashville, TN to my door in just over 24 hours. Anne called me at work around nine to let me know that it had arrived. That made for a really long day of work, let me tell you. Finally, though, I was home and could open the package. Well, after the kids were down for bed at least. Now, for the past three plus hours, I've been working on getting everything installed (FireFox, Pidgin, Hamachi).

Now, if only I could figure out why it's making so much noise each time it's accessing the hard drive. I wonder if I should be worried.