It’s been an eventful weekend.

On Friday night I brought my new EnPower laptop En 668  home, loaded up my backed up data, downloaded and set up iTunes and installed the music files. Installed Microsoft Office 2003 and Active Synch 4.5.  4 hours after I fired it up it died, refusing to boot up.

The following morning Publius and I set out for PC Club getting there as they opened the doors. Publius helped them troubleshoot the unit, eliminating the memory and the hard drive as potential causes. Presumeably its the motherboard or the CPU itself. As one would expect they are being very decent about it – they will build me a new one, we will install my already data-laden hard drive and see what happens. If we can’t make this work I will have to go to Dell, hat in hand, endure Vista until SP-1 is actually released (its out in beta right now but some say it won’t come out until 2009) and take it from there.

The only reason I am not buying a Dell is that they won't sell me the machine I want with XP-SP2 and not Vista. Leo Laporte’s frequent rants about Vista make me wary about the OS - although I can’t find any of his reasons in writing, he still railed against it on one Sunday show this past January. In addition there are other posts critical of Vista; examples here and (more recent) here. Finally, some analysts are even suggesting to Microsoft that they keep XP around until 2009.

I suppose a computer that actually works is better than one that has Vista and takes 4 minutes to connect to your wireless network after startup . I would like to give PC Club a chance to make this work for me.