I found a pretty good deal on a laptop during CompUSA’s three day clearance (or some such), so I went and picked it up to replace Mindy’s aging Averatec (which has been a trusty old thing, but is, as I mentioned, getting some gray hairs). Unfortunately (or not, depending on how you look at it), it came with Vista Home Basic preinstalled.

Before buying it, I spent some time researching the downgrade clauses in the various Microsoft EULA for Windows Vista. According to everything I could find (and I’d post links if I wasn’t so lazy), the OEM EULAs do NOT include any sort of rights to previous versions of Windows, so if you were planning on that, don’t.

First impressions of Vista, however, seem to mirror what everyone’s told me: slow and annoying. The laptop came with 512MB of RAM, about half people said I’d want, so that’s part of it. But all of the confirmation popups have nothing to do with hardware.

All in all, though, after switching back to the “legacy” interface and removing the desktop background, I think it’ll be manageable. Although I am considering installing Ubuntu…

I was introduced to these by a coworker, and while I haven’t tried them myself, he uses them on a daily basis to power his wireless mouse. They are batteries which are recharged using a USB port. Sure, they might not be up to USB specification-snuff (rules are meant to be broken, no?), but they’re cool nonetheless. And in my never-ending quest to carry a single power cord for all of my various gadgets, this is a huge leap forward.

If you’re using the RoundCube webmail project and haven’t been following it’s progress very closely (so you’re like me), they released Release Candidate Number 1 last month. It claims to have fixed the annoying session timeout issues, and, while I haven’t tested that exactly over the past few days that I’ve had it installed, there seem to be improvements just about everywhere. In particular, downloading attachments no longer feels like pulling teeth.

Oh, and if you’re not using the RoundCube webmail project, maybe you should be.