Welcome to the 21st Century…
I never thought it would be this easy.
I got both my laptop and my NetGear wireless Internet router/PC card shipped yesterday. Getting everything set up last night reminded me of the first PC I ever bought back in about 1994. That was a logistical nightmare, but this one couldn’t have been more simple. Here’s my timeline from last night:
515PM – walk in the front door, have the Dell box containing my laptop and the Amazon box containing the router/PC card.
520PM – after getting the dog outside and cracking a beer, grabbed the router box and trudged upstairs to the desktop PC and cable modem for setup.
530PM – wireless router is now recognizing signal from the cable box, and is wired for Internet access to the desktop.
535PM – booting laptop up for the first time
550PM – after logging on, setting up user accounts on XP (one for me, one for guest), and changing my desktop wallpaper, I go to add/remove programs to wipe some of the extra crap off the hard drive.
605PM – have removed MS Money, MS Encarta, AOL (which takes forever to remove), and Quicktime. Getting ready to set up PC Card for wireless Internet.
610PM – software is loaded for PC Card, I’ve plugged it in, and I now have wireless Internet access on my laptop.
My god was that easy. When I bought my first PC, it probably took ten minutes plugging cords in, nearly an hour and a half loading Windows from floppy disks, about an hour on tech support hold, another twenty minutes being talked through a minor OS crash fix on initial boot by a Dell phone service rep, and another hour getting all the settings where I wanted them.
55 minutes versus nearly four hours. Wow.
I spent another hour or so getting some of the essential programs downloaded from the Net. I’m posting this list in case any of you have any further suggestions for basic utilities I should download (aside from Poker Tracker, I need to buy that at this point):
Party Poker
Choice Poker
Open Office.org
Spybot S&D
Ad-Aware
Sybase (?) Personal Firewall (I’ve yet to configure this)
Adobe PDF Reader
WinZip
Am I missing anything? Keep in mind, this is really almost solely an Internet/Email machine. I’m not a gamer, and I don’t have a CD burner.
Lastly, should I remove the Word Perfect Productivity Suite, seeing as I downloaded Open Office, and I have the installation CD for WP anyway? It would definitely free up some HD space, I’d assume.