We are back in the

We are back in the Holiday Inn in Las Cruses, NM; only 5 hours from home. It will be so good to get home … 20 days away is a long time.

For this trip I took along a new HP Pavilion zd8000 laptop instead of a Mac PowerBook G4. I love my Mac, but must admit that the HP performed admirably. I burned the book “Linked” to CDs using iTunes, three times faster then on my Mac. Windows Movie Maker was disappointing when compared to Apples iMovie and iDVD. However, I purchased Adobe PhotoShop Elements 4.0 and Premier Elements 2.0 and found they provide all the features of iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD, and more. They were easy to use and fast. The HP has the serious advantage of duel Pentium 4, 3 Mhz processors while the PowerBooks is only a 1.2 MHz G4. The operating system, Windows XP Professional is OK, OS X is much better. The constant threat of worms, viruses, Spyware, Rootkits is really a pain. As a Mac user I am just not used to all these threats. The HP is running Symantec AntiVirus, Internet Security, and AntiSpam, along with Microsoft AntiSpyware. Am I protected? Doubt it …