I had a feeling this was going to happen this week. On Monday after uploading more photos into Shadow I had less than 10 GBs of hard disk space left and thought that if FNAC put on one of their “Día de Socios” (members’ day) I would go and get a new laptop, as I would get 10% off. Two days later I got a text message from FNAC telling me about the next one and so on Thursday morning I showed up ready to get the steel-blue 15.6″ Toshiba I’d been looking at. And then I saw The Greyhound. It’s the same one that I mentioned here but as it was now in stock I could actually see what it looked like. And I have to say it looks pretty sleek and the cover is also quite attractive, like silver and grey tiny-square graph paper under glass. I think the salesclerk was a bit surprised when I asked him to confirm the specs for me and then said, “okay, I’ll take it”. The entire transaction took less than five minutes. But of course I’d done all my research previously.

I have to say I’m very pleased with the new beast, though it will still take me awhile to get him all set up (bookmarks are taking forever). It’s quite nice having a big screen (17.3″) again and, with all my photos and programmes installed, I still have 470 GBs of hard drive available. Yay! But it’ll take some time to get used to Windows 7. One very annoying thing about it is that it doesn’t come with Century Gothic installed, which is the font I use on all my websites, including this blog. It’s actually quite disturbing to think that everyone on a Mac or using Windows 7 doesn’t get to see my sites as I’ve set them up – in another font it just doesn’t look right and the spacing also goes wonky. So I immediately got online to download Century Gothic, somehow chose a dodgy site in my haste, and ended up with a malicious browser highjacker called Babylon, which was a bugger to get rid of. Thanks to Sledpress for the additional help with Firefox!

Also thanks to Sled for suggesting this name. I’d been going back and forth between a couple of possible computer names, but as this one is grey and sleek and fast “Greyhound” fits. It also fits because Pat used to foster rescued greyhounds, and was as gadget-crazy as I am, so this is yet another way of keeping her in my thoughts.