I know the economy is a little shaky but...

Picture the scene - 10am on a Sunday morning and the phone rings. Its someone from the bank we have an auto loan with.  After some of the usual ID verification malarkey we get down to business - when are we planning on paying?

We check online with our bank whilst they are on the phone - Did we miss a payment? No. Are we late? No.

In fact it's not due until Tuesday (remember its Sunday) and its scheduled to clear Monday. So why are they phoning?  Just to ask and check if we plan on paying on the same day, with the same amount through the same method that we have for over a year.

This is also the same bank that we had the lease, for the same car, through for 5 years. Never missing or late with any of those payments.

Surely things are this bad that my payment is going to keep them afloat.

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The newest arrival in the Mead household...

I came home Thursday and there it was.  A nice dull-brown cardboard box sitting on the table. Within lay my first-ever self-bought laptop.

I have always used the ones from my work, but when I started at my new job I felt this was the chance to have my own.  I consulted Tom (oracle of laptops) and wanted something as similar as I could get to the Dell Latitude D820 I had at Optiem.  He fired me across some recommendations and I settled on the Acer Extensa 5620Z.

This laptop comes with 4 USB ports, S-Video and one for our digital video camera. The 3GB of RAM and 160GB HD is nice, though I'm not a fan of the pre-partitioning 70/70.

It's pretty light weight, has a built in web cam and Vista installed (which I'm giving a week to see if I need to go back to XP).

It has been a little tedious installing everything (couldn't deactivate my Fireworks CS4 beforehand) but so far everything is going well.  The screen is good, camera is working, and my fingers are getting used to the new keyboard.

So I'm now loading it up with Flock, Evernote, Open Office, VLC media player, Miro and a lot other fave apps.  Only problem so far has been iTunes not seeing the music on the external drive without importing it all again.  Glenn pointed  me to an article that  might help so I'll check that.

Technorati tags: acer, laptop, vista

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