Friday, December 08, 2006

Back in Business

2 months to wait for a computer repair isn't at all a reasonable time frame for me to work with. Despite the lab ordering a spare backup notebook for pubic use, I decided last weekend that I would fork out the cash and buy myself a new laptop.

After much consideration and walking around the electronics department of a Yodobashi electronics store, I settled on a acer Aspire 5102WLMi notebook. "An ACER!?" you might ask? Well, after poking around the store for about 2 days and researching a whole bunch of features online, I decided that this notebook gave me the best bang for the buck.

It's got a dual core of Turion processors, 120 GB HD, got a multilayer DVD-ROM writer and an ATi integrated graphics chip (unfortunately with no onboard memory, however). For about $1100, I decided that it wasn't a bad price considering that I'd have to spend about $600 for a repair. Why not get a better computer? And so I did.

The computer is equipped with a Japanese OS and a Japanese keyboard. For the most part, the keyboard has the same layout QWERTY layout as most north American keyboards. The subtle difference is that some of the punctuation keys have been moved around. The @ , ' , " , \ and a few other keys have been moved around. The enter and the backspace key are a little smaller to. I have gotten used to the keyboard layout for the most part already. I was rather surprised to find how quickly I was able to adapt to the new layout.

I am not sure how it is for current installations of Win XP, but I had the most unfortunate experience having the "Cleartype" fonts enabled by default. What this means is that the font used uses some sort of sub-pixel approximation to increase the resolution of your monitor, supposedly making text a little more crisper. That was not the case for me!

After suffering for exhausted eyes for littler over 2 days, I was determined to figure out the root of this problem. Initially, I spent most of my time trying to change font settings of the computer but that didn't work to no avail. There is a Microsoft webpage out there that you can use a directX plug in to deactivate the ClearType fonts. Doing that has made a world of difference for my eyes.

When I do have some spare time, I am going to disassemble the old laptop to try and find out what went wrong. If I am lucky, I might be able to find the problem and make a repair. If not, well it will be for an educational experience anyways. If I actually can get the other laptop going, I would definitely like to try and turn it into a Linux box if possible. We'll see how that goes.

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