We have begun Manda's migration to Oregon. Friday night we picked up a 16' cargo van and tow dolly from the Penske truck rental in Howell. From there we loaded Manda's stuff (mostly shoes and clothes) and loaded her 11 year old Grand Am up on the tow dolly.
Next it was Bud's turn to get farmed out for the almost two weeks we would be traveling. Since he does not get along with my mother's male Jack Russell we take him out to Linda's Mom and Dad's house. They have two female dogs so Bud just takes over the house and everyone gets along reasonably well. Linda and I both looked for him all evening and every time we have stopped today for gas or just a rest stop we kept thinking we needed to get him out so he could do his potty thing. Funny how we get so conditioned to things in our live and have trouble making the change.
We managed to make it to Des Moines, Iowa the first day, about 500 miles. The cargo van worked well although we were both hoping for a little better then the 10 miles per gallon we have been getting today. Of course since we are headed west we have had a pretty good head wind, hopefully the wind will let up from here on out and we can get a little better mileage, expecially since gas prices are running about $4 per gallon.
The only other complint I have with the van is it doesn't have cruise! I have been so dependent on cruise control I have been having a lot of trouble maintaining a steady speed. It's getting worse as we are driving through the rolling hills of Iowa.
One thing I have to tell you about is a little joke we played on Manda. You see when we got home from Texas I noticed that she was missing one of the mufflers on the car. When asked about it she said it fell off on the express way and she didn't notice because her music was too loud. So when we called tonight we told her that everything was going well but someplace along the way we lost her car off the tow dolly. We told her we were to busy talking and listening to the radio to notice it was gone until we stopped for the night. She is so gulible she actually believed us! What a goof!
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
A new Dell Laptop
Amanda has managed to get about 6 years life out of the laptop we bought her while she was still in high school. She ran out of hard drive space a long time ago, just after she got into music downloads, and of course memory requirements are much greater now then they were six years ago. So to get by we invested in an external hard drive. By moving all the music and pictures to the external drive the built in drive had enough breathing space to actually function as work space for the operating system. As far as memory goes, I installed the memory I took out of my laptop when I moved to Vista into hers. Between those two changes she managed to get this last years use out of the old machine.
Graduation brought some money into her life and we decided to use part of it to purchase a replacement machine. We did a similar thing for Jamie when she graduated from Western Michigan but she decided she could get by with a desktop machine. You sure can purchase a lot more machine in a desktop configuration then you can as a laptop for the same amount of money.
We have had good luck purchasing refurbished machines from Dell, as a matter of fact the last three laptops we purchased have all been refurbished. You don't get to customize it but there is usually a good inventory of machines, so you can pretty much get whatever you are looking for. I have been looking into Dell's new Vestro line. These are geared to the business user so they aren't bleeding edge but are put together with good components and don't have all the "crapware" loaded like the normal consumer machines. I call all the trial applications that get loaded to most new machines "crapware". They are either only good for a short "trial" period or are partially crippled so you will shell out the money for the real product.
Other great thing about refurbished is it's ready to ship as soon as you decided on which one to purchase. I found and ordered it on Sunday and we received it on Thursday. The bad thing about that was now I needed to get busy transferring all the songs and pictures and other stuff she had accumulated over the past few years to the new machine.
Here is the rundown on the machine we purchased at $1,097 including a 3 year extended warranty, sales tax and shipping.
Vestro 1700 laptop
17" display
Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 (2.2GHz)
3 GB memory
160 gig hard drive
8X DVD writer
Nvidia 256meg graphics card
It actually took me a couple of days to do the transfers using Vista's included ‘Windows Easy Transfer’ utility, which included a failed first attempt. I am not sure what happened because I didn't do anything different with the second try than I did in the original attempt. All I know is when I went back to check on the progress the old machine had stalled with a write error.
Additional applications I loaded for her were Office XP and Trend Micro Internet Security. I figure any security suite that survived through 4 years at MSU with no infections was something we needed to stick with!
Graduation brought some money into her life and we decided to use part of it to purchase a replacement machine. We did a similar thing for Jamie when she graduated from Western Michigan but she decided she could get by with a desktop machine. You sure can purchase a lot more machine in a desktop configuration then you can as a laptop for the same amount of money.
We have had good luck purchasing refurbished machines from Dell, as a matter of fact the last three laptops we purchased have all been refurbished. You don't get to customize it but there is usually a good inventory of machines, so you can pretty much get whatever you are looking for. I have been looking into Dell's new Vestro line. These are geared to the business user so they aren't bleeding edge but are put together with good components and don't have all the "crapware" loaded like the normal consumer machines. I call all the trial applications that get loaded to most new machines "crapware". They are either only good for a short "trial" period or are partially crippled so you will shell out the money for the real product.
Other great thing about refurbished is it's ready to ship as soon as you decided on which one to purchase. I found and ordered it on Sunday and we received it on Thursday. The bad thing about that was now I needed to get busy transferring all the songs and pictures and other stuff she had accumulated over the past few years to the new machine.
Here is the rundown on the machine we purchased at $1,097 including a 3 year extended warranty, sales tax and shipping.
Vestro 1700 laptop
17" display
Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 (2.2GHz)
3 GB memory
160 gig hard drive
8X DVD writer
Nvidia 256meg graphics card
It actually took me a couple of days to do the transfers using Vista's included ‘Windows Easy Transfer’ utility, which included a failed first attempt. I am not sure what happened because I didn't do anything different with the second try than I did in the original attempt. All I know is when I went back to check on the progress the old machine had stalled with a write error.
Additional applications I loaded for her were Office XP and Trend Micro Internet Security. I figure any security suite that survived through 4 years at MSU with no infections was something we needed to stick with!
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Under the weather and Graduation
It's been a while since my last post, I have been a bit under the weather. I made it all winter without incident but then once we got back to Michigan and I was exposed to the Nieces and what ever I may have come in contact with when I went in for a physical was just more than my system could handle. It sort of knocked hell out of me for about 5 days but we are finally on our way to recovery.
Amanda our youngest graduated from Michigan State this last weekend with a Civil Engineering degree. The graduation ceremony went smoothly, then we met back at Mom's for a steak fry with some of the neighbors and a couple of Manda's long time school friends.
She has a job lined up with the Oregon Department of Transportation. Our next big project will be to get her focussed on finding a place a to live before we get her there, what she will be taking with her and the general logistics of getting her there and ready to go to work the beginning of June. Linda has pretty much everything lined up that she can but we still need to know how much we are taking and such so we can rent a truck for the move. She has a beater of a car (97 Pontiac Grand Am) that runs pretty good but sure looks like junk. It is hard to decide if we should just try to sell it here and get a new vehicle for her in Oregon or spend a little to fix this one up and transport it to Oregon. She has a lead on a room in a house that would be very close to work so maybe it would be better to let the raggedy car sit around rather than having a new vehicle getting the usual dings and dents with little usage.
The fish pond is up and running, clearing up nicely. Only have 1 fish left so we will need to pick up some replacements pretty soon. It was a really tough winter and our luck over-wintering fish didn't fair as well this year as it has in the past. I have had the usual repairs to the stream and bog areas to eliminate water leaks but nothing more than expected.
Amanda our youngest graduated from Michigan State this last weekend with a Civil Engineering degree. The graduation ceremony went smoothly, then we met back at Mom's for a steak fry with some of the neighbors and a couple of Manda's long time school friends.
She has a job lined up with the Oregon Department of Transportation. Our next big project will be to get her focussed on finding a place a to live before we get her there, what she will be taking with her and the general logistics of getting her there and ready to go to work the beginning of June. Linda has pretty much everything lined up that she can but we still need to know how much we are taking and such so we can rent a truck for the move. She has a beater of a car (97 Pontiac Grand Am) that runs pretty good but sure looks like junk. It is hard to decide if we should just try to sell it here and get a new vehicle for her in Oregon or spend a little to fix this one up and transport it to Oregon. She has a lead on a room in a house that would be very close to work so maybe it would be better to let the raggedy car sit around rather than having a new vehicle getting the usual dings and dents with little usage.
The fish pond is up and running, clearing up nicely. Only have 1 fish left so we will need to pick up some replacements pretty soon. It was a really tough winter and our luck over-wintering fish didn't fair as well this year as it has in the past. I have had the usual repairs to the stream and bog areas to eliminate water leaks but nothing more than expected.
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