Friday, September 28, 2012

Eglin AFB and Hurlburt Field – New Laptop

(Destin, FL) Hi 85 Lo 73 -- It took us awhile this morning to decide what we wanted to do today. We decided to visit the two military bases in the area, Eglin AFB and Hurburt Field.

We started out by driving across the bay to Eglin, the largest AFB in the world. We had lunch at the BX food court, then walked around the BX. I'm looking for a new laptop to replace my failing Lenovo. But the BX didn't have any that interested me. We then left for Hurlburt Field, about 10 miles west of Eglin. On the way we stopped at the Okaloosa County Supervisor of Elections Office to pick up our absentee ballots for the presidential election. Our mail service (and our domicile address) is about 20 miles north of us in Crestview in the same county, so this worked out good. The Hurlburt BX also didn't have any laptops that interested me. So we picked up a few items in the commissary and headed back to Destin.

Our friend Arlene told us of a great donut place called Donut Hole. Jim has a real weakness for good donuts, so we stopped by the one in Destin and bought a few to bring home. Thanks Arlene.

I've been wanting to buy some fresh seafood for our freezer. We stopped at a couple fish markets, but oh my the prices! We decided it would be cheaper to eat at a restaurant and save cooking time.

Destin is right on the Gulf coast. (Click on pictures to enlarge)
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The water here is so pretty!
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There's a Best Buy store in Destin, so we stopped there to see what kind of laptops they have. Many of my friends in the chat room are trying to convince me to buy a Mac. I've done a lot of thinking about that, and for various reasons I decided to stick with Windows. The Macs are nice machines, but the combination of higher price (three times more expensive than the laptops I'm looking at), and a lot of incompatibility with some of my programs, and the learning curve, convinced me to stick with Windows. Thanks everyone for the advice you've given me. Anyway, all this is to say I found a machine that I really like and was in my price range at Best Buy. It's an Acer Aspire. For those of you interested in the technical specs, here they are:

Windows® 7 Home Premium - 64-bit version - AMD Quad-Core A8-4500M Accelerated Processor 1.9GHz with TurboCORE technology up to 2.8GHz (4MB L2 Cache) - 4GB DDR3 SDRAM - 500GB hard drive - 15.6" HD Widescreen CineCrystal™ LCD display (1366 x 768) - AMD Radeon™ HD 7640G w/ 512MB of graphics system memory - AMD A70M Fusion™ chipset - 8X DVD±RW DL - webcam - multi-gesture touchpad - 802.11b/g/n WLAN - gigabit LAN - Bluetooth® - HDMI® - USB - Multi-in-1 card reader - 6-cell battery - 1-year limited warranty. Color: glossy black.

It will meet my needs, so we’ll see how long this one lasts. I'm really hard on laptops, especially the keyboard. It's all that chatting. :)  Now it’s going to be a fun couple of days getting everything set up.

I went over to the pier to take some sunset pictures. It wasn’t real pretty, but it’s the first one we’ve seen on water in a long time.
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I turned around and saw the harvest moon.
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A nice ending to a full day. Life is good.

5 comments:

KarenInTheWoods said...

Yup.. I just bought the bigger Acer, the 17.5 inch screen, called the Acer Aspire 7250 same specs as yours only called Mesh Grey on the lid.

My daughter has the same one, and it never overheats or crashes. She can even set it on the fabric ottoman for hours and it never shuts off like my Dell does when it overheats.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Karen and Steveio
(Our Blog) RVing: Small House... BIG Backyard
http://kareninthewoods-kareninthewoods.blogspot.com

Sam&Donna Weibel said...

Don't forget you guys are close to Pensacola and a day at the Naval Aviation Museum, is a must especially if the Blue Angels are on a practice day, you can call ahead and find out when they are practicing.I remember a Det I was on with the USS Intrepid in Pensacola, it's a great Liberty town. Be safe out there. Sam & Donna.

owensontheroad said...

My Dell is only 2 years old, and I've replaced the keyboard. The cursor tended to jump all the time, driving my crazy! Now the '4' key fell off, so George crazy-glued it back on.
Geez...

Phyllis said...

Glad I stopped by today to visit your blog. It's been a while.

I, too, am having laptop issues. My 3 y/o Toshiba is down again. I've had it in various shops at least 3 times. I've given up on it. I am back on my OLD Acer and doing okay but I am about to shop for a new laptop.

Others have told me to change to a Mac. I am leary too, for your same reasons. After reading your comments and that this old Acer is getting me through, I just might get a new one.

LakeConroePenny,TX said...

Oh, That's why your writing was so much more distinct in the chat room, the new laptop puts more ink on the page!! LOL!
Happy Trails, Penny.

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