Sharing the pain of a new PC

It was an exciting day, my daughter's new laptop PC came today. I was all swelled up with anticipation and emailed her with the news. I asked her if I could unwrap it and play a little with it. Laptops are all contained unless you buy all the extra doodads. I read over all the papers and plugged it in. Soon after turning it on I woke up to the fact this is a MS Windows machine. It has Vista on it and boy was it slow booting up. Well, that was the first boot. It would have been sweet if it weren't for the registration and user agreement screens. I'll let my daughter get into those things, the updates and anti-virus stuff. Yes it has the new Office 2007 and a bunch of other useful software on it and I was well aware of how much it cost to do that. Monopoly produced sticker shock takes the fun out of everything. I really like getting more bang for my buck.
I guess I am a bit old school, I like my desktop over a laptop. The all in one units are a maintenance risk and are fragile. Laptops are a known flight risk, you have to tie them to the desk at work or school. What I do like about laptops is that they are greener than desktops and use less power. I don't know about being recyclable. What is the worst thing about laptops, that finger driven mouse pad. If you have a low level of manual dexterity, like myself, get a real mouse. And those two mouse pad buttons are often too sensitive, making unintended selections. Also the keyboard is a nightmare till you can find all the hidden functions. Let's see, floppies are gone and so are PS/2 ports, so you can't use that "old hardware" without adapters. Progress is getting away from this old boy, I may have to update someday, but not today.

What is in the future of PC's? Just think, a PC today could run Linux or Apple or Microsoft OS's on the same hardware and I think the only difference between them is the ROM for Apple's OS. Then add in solid state flash hard drives (coming soon). The desktop PC will slowly go away and the laptop will become the standard but they must get rid of that stupid mouse pad. Look for the PC to be the base station for your PDA, electronically linking you to all your data, email and phone. Hummm... wearable PC's and voice control are still in the future. We are slowly being assimilated.