Chuck’s Home World

Well, it snowed yesterday. It looks to be about 3 or 4 inches so it’s not too bad. Thankfully it’s happened on the weekend as well, and I’ve been sick so I had no reason to go out.

Anyway, today I’m actually feeling pretty good. I hope to get a few miles in, but we’ll have to wait and see how things go. I sure do need to start burning more calories, so I can continue to drop the weight. I have a follow-up on Feb. 23 and want to be lower than last one by at least 5 pounds.

I decided to see if I could speed up the Netbook. I’ve ordered, for Monday delivery, a new hard drive. I’m going to try out a solid state drive (SSD). I went with a drive that was not quite as large as the one I have, but I could have gone with one that was half the price (and half the size), but decided to go with the extra storage.  The SSD should give me a bit more battery life (but its lasting all day when I put it to sleep when not needed), but it couldn’t hurt to get more out of it.

Windows 7 Pro does boot pretty fast on the machine, but there are a few applications that I’d like to make run a bit faster and these are disk related applications (a couple of database and Lotus Notes based).

I should run some benchmarks before and after.  I’ll have to find some good free software to help me with that. I’m sure one or more of the computer mags I get will have one or two that I can use.

I guess I’ll end this post and talk about the Apple iPad that was just announced this past week. My overall feeling is “ho hum”, but if I got one for free then perhaps I’d be more excited. I mean, the iPod Touch was one of those things that I felt I didn’t need, but now that I have one (free from 2008 Christmas party) I really like it.  I think the only thing I really like about it is the ability to have something quick and fast to browse the web while watch TV. The netbook is OK for that, but the screen resolution on the netbook leaves a lot to be desired.