New laptop

My fantabulous new Macintosh laptop has made it as far as Lewisberry, PA.
It will probably have arrived by the time you read this.
Actually, it’s refurbished, from Apple Computer’s Apple Store.
I was told to do it this way, since Apple’s technicians were more likely to make sure it worked than the clerks at a local Apple outlet.
Cost less too. (So did that demonstrator Volkswagen Dasher station-wagon we bought long ago that kept falling apart.)
I was told that all they might do locally was open the box to verify the contents.
500-gig hard-drive, four gigs of RAM, 2.8 GigaHertz Intel Core 2 Duo processor — or is it two processors?
My current rig is two processors, but Motorola, what MACs used to be.
The new machine is coming by FedEx.
At 2.1 gigs of RAM with a 60-gig hard-drive, my current rig was overkill when I bought it. —Still is, somewhat.
The imperative at that time was I was sick-and-tired of the “not enough memory” message (RAM) — into virtual memory on the hard-drive, and bog-slow.
So I went with 2.1 gigs instead of 512 megs, the standard at that time.
A 40-gig hard-drive was standard, 60-gig optional. Didn’t cost much more.
Now 75% is used; about 25% is left. I recovered some by emptying my trash.
Some of that is my previous ‘pyooter, a beige G3 tabletop.
I used to say a 60-gig hard-drive was big enough to swallow an aircraft carrier.
Now a friend is telling me 500 gigs is “medium-size.”
Yesterday (Wednesday, March 3, 2010) I happened to harass a fellow MAC user on my way out of the Canandaigua YMCA exercise-gym.
This guy is the quintessential MAC user, young and hip.
What Apple uses in its ‘pyooter ads.
The Windows PC users are always depicted as droll and turgid. Hip wannabees that obviously aren’t.
Don’t know where I fit into Apple’s image of youthful hipness, being an old grayhead — I’m 66.
“Once you drive OS-X,” I say; “anything else is toast.”
I’ve driven plenty of PCs; my wife has one.
My going with Macintosh goes back to when the mighty Mezz computerized in the late ‘90s.
Coworkers were also telling me Macintosh was superior; that Microsoft Windows was a mere pretender.
Don’t know as it is anymore; although back then Windows was bog-slow driving Photoshop®.
Plus the Messenger had been using a PC-based rastorized-image-processor (the “RIP”) that crashed a lot.
When we got the MACs, that RIP-machine was converted into our OCR scanner (optical-character-recognition), and it couldn’t be shut down without pulling the plug.
So I bought my old beige G3 tabletop; it replaced a Windows PC.
At the Messenger I drove a humble iMAC, purloined from a reporter who quit.
We added a lot of additional RAM; it allowed me to drive Photoshop and Quark®.
I also drove the Messenger’s web-site with that iMAC; although it was an earlier iteration.
“So whatcha got?” I asked.
“MacBook Pro laptop, two GigaHertz Intel Core 2 Duo, 500-gig hard-drive; not the most recent, but fairly,” he said.
“Same thing I’m getting, more-or-less,” I said.
“Are you a MAC user?” he asked.
“G4 tower about seven-eight years old,” I said.
“The driving force this time is portability. Ya can’t take a tower with you,” I added.
“I’ve always liked my laptop being a laptop,” he said.
“Additionally I wanted to edit a video-file about 20 minutes long,” I said. “I was told there was no way under heaven my old rig would swallow such a huge file.”
“I’ve done a lot of graphics, but no video,” he said. “And it’s configured for Photoshop, which I have.”
So another overkill, and my friend suggests that overkill will lead to more videos.
Probably.
I don’t fit the mold of the youthful MAC user, but I ain’t dead yet.
It’s play.

• “Rig” is computer. “‘Pyooter” is computer.
• “Beige G3 tabletop” is computer-tech nomenclature. The ‘pyooter was “tabletop” (horizontal), and was beige. It was Apple’s G3 model. —Many of Apple’s G3 desktop computers were beige tabletops. (The new laptop is probably a G5.)
• I work out regularly in the Canandaigua YMCA exercise-gym. (“Canandaigua” [“cannon-DAY-gwuh”] is a small city to the east nearby where we live in Western NY. The city is also within a rural town called “Canandaigua.” The name is Indian, and means “Chosen Spot.” —It’s about 15 miles away.) —The guy is a health supervisor.
• “OS-X” (OS-10) is Apple’s current computer operating system. Over five years of use, I’ve yet to have it crash.
• The “mighty Mezz” is the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, from where I retired over four years ago. Best job I ever had.
• “Photoshop” and “Quark” are both computer software applications. Photoshop is for processing images (or graphics), and Quark is a glorified word-processor, that can do complete newspaper pages. The Messenger was using both, plus “Freehand;” the so-called “big three.”
A MAC, at that time, was supposed to be better at running “the big three.”
• My wife of 42+ years is “Linda.” Like me she’s retired, but she worked part-time at the West Bloomfield post-office. She retired as a computer programmer. She no longer works at the post-office.
• “Optical-character-recognition” (OCR) scanning is to scan a document and create a computer text-file. The OCR scanning software recognizes the letters.