New Mac

Sorry for the long absence, everyone.  My mac laptop crashed on me a couple weeks back and so I haven't had regular access to the internet.  I think there was some massive hardware failure, but I don't know what it is.  Trying to boot it up at this point just leads to it asking for the os or some files, anyway.  It blinks a folder with a question mark at me, but I have no way of delivering it the goods since I don't currently know where the startup disk is, and even if I had it, the disk drive just stopped working for no apparent reason before the crash.  So, I had to get a new laptop.

By "new," I mean "used and almost the same model as the previous one" because it is much cheaper and all I want is a machine that will let me check email, use skype, and create latex documents, which the old one was doing fine until it just melted or whatever.  Hopefully I will be able to pull the files off the hard drive. I've been told this is relatively easy to do with older model macs because apple hadn't thought of making it nearly impossible to remove the hard drive yet.  I do have to say that while I like using a mac for some reasons, apple's tendency to make you do everything through them (for a fee, of course) is creepy and pretty awful.

Anyway, the new one is running fine thus far, but I want to vent on a couple things here.

1) The seller didn't send the CD, which wouldn't be that big a deal, if he/she had bothered to reset things to factory settings.  As it was, I had to search the internet for a method for resetting the administrator password, because a computer you can't install things on is basically just a (safari-using, ugh) web surfing machine.

2) The estimated time of arrival for this laptop was Tuesday-Thursday of last week.  The seller's only provided tracking information was "USPS," which is completely unhelpful and also turned out to be incorrect, since it arrived via UPS today.  I was really more annoyed by the inaccurate estimate than by the lateness, because I basically had to sit at home, waiting for the mail, as it is delivered in the afternoon here, all day, just to be disappointed when all that would come are coupon books and bills.  Meh, I will probably note that in the review.

Ok, next post will have something of interest to people in it.