Sandy and I are sitting

Sandy and I are sitting in the local Borders bookstore enjoying café-mochas. They have a T-Mobile hot spot, so thought it would be a good chance to test out the new hp laptop. Found that it worked well. Connected easily. In fact this post is from the bookstore. Have had an eventful weekend getting this system set up. Managed to upgrade from XP Home to Professional. Successfully installed Microsoft Office 2000, SQL Server, Visual Studio .NET, SourceEdit, Netscape, Palm desktop, and VMWare. Under VMWare installed Windows 2000 Enterprise Server and RedHat 9 in text mode only. Have made at least 6 attempts to install RedHat 9 with miserable results. VMWare seems to work well when you install various Microsoft products, but can’t handle Linux. Even tried to install Suse. Sent VMWare email which detailed my problems. Hope they respond. Would very much like to use this product to run Linux, BSD, etc. on this box.

Purchased an upgrade to Partition Commander and attempted to partition the hard drive. All it managed to do was screw up my MBR. Seems that when Partition Commander attempts to display its GUI after reboot it can’t render properly. Since I can’t read the screen, I can’t partition the hard drive. Had hoped that RedHat would install on an empty partition. Have also sent them email.

Yesterday the plan was to return this system on Monday and get a Powerbook G4. However, I really need this XP for an upcoming project. Its only a three month project, so have decided to make the switch then if I am still unhappy.

Still need to figure out how to get Linux to run on this system (hp pavilion ze5468CL).