Sam and I spent most of our date time look­ing at lap­tops. Yes, we’re final­ly replac­ing the one that died last sum­mer. Yay!

I find it eas­i­er to put what I find online in con­text after hav­ing actu­al­ly played with a bunch of machines tonight, so I’ll be doing a lot of research online.

Any­body have any strong rec­om­men­da­tions or good/bad expe­ri­ences to share? Knowl­edge of any places that give “edu­ca­tion­al dis­counts” that aren’t just “steer your stu­dents to us and we’ll give you a lit­tle low­er price on your own machines” deals? Sure expe­ri­ence exor­cis­ing Vista from a “Vista-com­pat­i­ble” PC? Please speak up!

A few weeks ago, my PC was some­how infect­ed with some nasty thing that tried to turn it in to a spam­bot via dri­ve­by down­load. I had the cur­rent ver­sion of Syman­tec AntiVirus run­ning, set to the absolute high­est para­noia lev­els and updat­ed dai­ly. I also had Spy­bot Search & Destroy run­ning, again, updat­ed dai­ly and care­ful­ly con­fig­ured. I had both do full sys­tem scans every day, as well as keep­ing them mem­o­ry-res­i­dent at all times.

Nei­ther pro­gram ever gave so much as a peep. In fact, when I found the orig­i­nal file that was to blame and checked it man­u­al­ly with Syman­tec AV, it passed as though it were as inno­cent as a babe. If I had­n’t had the antivirus soft­ware con­fig­ured to show me an icon in the systray when it was check­ing out­go­ing mail, who knows when I would have real­ized that the sys­tem was com­pro­mised? As it was, I knew with­in sec­onds. (Hey, I notice “out­go­ing mail” when my email pro­gram isn’t even open.) I end­ed up pulling out the eth­er­net cable to stop com­mu­ni­ca­tions ’til the sys­tem was clean.