Lenovo ThinkCentre M73 Mini Tower

In the fall of 2011, my old Compaq laptop finally gave up the ghost. I won't touch any Dell hardware (in fact, Dell couldn't give me a laptop for free -- I wouldn't accept it; I used a Dell laptop when I worked at LSI Logic and it always seemed to have one hardware problem after another); and as for HP, well, not only do their laptops run exceedingly hot, one never knows from day to day whether HP will still be in the PC business. So, I had heard good things about Lenovo (a Chinese-based company that had bought the IBM ThinkPad name and division), did some research -- and I ended up purchasing a Lenovo IdeaPad Z575, which I unboxed in this blog post on November 5, 2011.

The Z575 is a beautiful piece of hardware, with its 15.6-inch backlit HD display, and has performed superbly these past two-and-a-half years (knock on wood!). So, when it came time to replace my XP box (now that Microsoft is no longer supporting XP), I looked to Lenovo for that replacement.

Of course, I'm not one to purchase an off-the-shelf box. I had to put this one together, option by option, from the Lenovo website. I checked out the K-series towers, but eventually decided on the M-series. I had initially settled on the M93p tower, and had it completely configured, when I figuratively slapped my hand, realizing that I didn't need that much power. So I settled for the ThinkCentre M73 mini tower instead. But, within that tower, I selected some special goodies.

I placed the order on March 27 with the understanding that delivery could be a minimum of 5 weeks; that's correct: 5 weeks. On April 8 I received a follow-up email that my order has been delayed and will be delivered within 30 days. Unfortunately, I had an open window in my schedule at the end of the 5 weeks, but not within that 30-day-delay window. Finally, on May 2, I received a shipment confirmation email. The box arrived on Friday, May 9, and has been sitting in a back room, still sealed, ever since.

Like I said, I didn't have an open window in my schedule at the end of those additional 30 days. See my recent blog posts on BayCon 2014 (which included the Writers Workshop and meeting with Matt Maxwell, upon my completing work on his novel Blue Highway) and the Kate Elliott "best of" collection (actually the "very best of"!).

But you're probably thinking, Just unpack the box, take out the bloody tower, and hook it up....

Unfortunately, the tower only came with Microsoft Office 2013 and Adobe Acrobat XI. If those were the only applications I needed to do my work, well, then, I could indeed have hooked everything up within a day. But then there were the Windows 7 drivers I had to track down for my Canoscan 4200F scanner. I had to install more than forty additional applications, some from discs (Acronis True Image Premium 2014 [and then create a bootable recovery disc], Epson WorkForce WF-3540 drivers and apps, FileMaker Pro 11, OmniPage Pro 18, and Webroot Personal Security, just to name a few), but most from online sources, too many to list fully, but here are a few: Google Chrome, Google Keep, Mozilla Firefox, 7Zip, Belarc Advisor, Evernote, FileZilla FTP, Greenshot, Homebase 3, Secunia PSI, TeamViewer 9, and five different cloud services. And, as I said, these are just a few.

Not to mention the fact that I've been using Microsoft Office 2003 for more than ten years; Microsoft Office 2010 only occasionally, when I use my ASUS Zenbook (see this blog post), which is typically when I'm traveling. But this new Lenovo box comes with Microsoft Office 2013, and I'm still trying to find the "x" to close just the document in MS Word without having to close the entire app. So, if I'm going to use this new tower for my day-to-day work, then I'm going to need a few days to familiarize myself with all the new apps (Greenshot, for one; since the previous screen capture utility I used doesn't work on Win7) and capabilities.

ASUS Zenbook: The Zen of Ultrabooks

On January 10 my ASUS Zenbook (UX31) arrived at the Microsoft Store in the Valley Fair mall in San Jose. I had to do quite a bit of hustling in order to give the store my money for this little gem. You see, back in December, when I began my search for an Ultrabook -- and eventually decided on the recently released ASUS Zenbook -- I discovered that this PC was in such high demand that they were completely sold out at all local stores¹, and online as well. Even Amazon sellers didn't have this particular model available.

The Microsoft Store at the Valley Fair mall had one on display, but none were in stock; I was told that a new shipment (though the store didn't know how many would be in the shipment) should arrive before Christmas. After the Christmas weekend came and went, I was told that the store was still expecting delivery later that week. And then, New Years weekend came and went -- and still no Zenbooks. So I contacted a number of Microsoft Stores across the country and discovered that the Zenbook was in stock in Colorado, and elsewhere. I spoke to a manager at the Colorado store: she was willing to ship a Zenbook to the Santa Clara store, but the request had to be initiated by that store. So, I contacted the Valley Fair store once again, explained the situation, and they agreed to do a stock transfer from another store; the store they chose, for whatever reason(s), was in the District of Columbia.

I was motivated to purchase the Zenbook from the Microsoft Store for a number of reasons: I liked what I saw at the store -- the layout of the store and the hardware on display that was available for hands-on use, the store personnel who were there to assist and answer questions; also, the store was running a special offer that would save me $200, and provide me with two years of free support and maintenance, along with a full copy of Microsoft Office 2010; and lastly, all PCs sold through the store go through a "Microsoft Signature" review -- the PC is tuned, bloatware removed, etc. Given the problems that had been reported with the initially released Zenbooks, I felt the "Microsoft Sig" touch would ensure that my Zenbook wouldn't have bad pixels, problems with the keyboard, etc.

As I said, the Zenbook arrived on January 10; I was handed a brown corrugated ASUS shipping box at the store, which I greedily opened as soon as I arrived home. Unfortunately, in my eagerness, I neglected to snap any unpacking pics, and that outer box has since been disposed of. However, inside this outer box was the nicely crafted Zenbook box (pictured below) -- a multi-level box that contained the Ultrabook, a padded brown fabric carrying case, and a few booklets in an envelope-like enclosure mounted to the bottom. A section along the right side of the box held the power supply, along with a matching brown fabric pouch that contained the VGA and Ethernet adapters.

Ommmmmmmmmmm....

Coming soon....

The Lenovo IdeaPad Z575

The new laptop has arrived. W00t!

And she is a beauty to behold: with 6GB DDR3 at 133MHz; an AMD A6-3400M at 1.4GHz; 750GB SATA Hard Drive; 15.6” HD LED Backlit Widescreen Display (1366x768); Integrated ATI Radeon HD 6520M Graphics; Blu-ray Rambo drive; SRS Premium Surround Sound, and 0.3MP Webcam -- to name but a few of the goodies.

Now, I just need to learn Windows 7 (after 10+ years of XP)....