One BIG downside of leaving StreetWise was that I needed to give back the laptop I’ve been using for the last 2 years. I loved that thing; it was perfectly tuned and configured for how I work. On the other hand though I was forced to buy a new one which means it’s upgrade time. Hooray!!

I decided to stay with Gateway for the brand and chose the NV52 which is twice as powerful as the last one. Of course it’s also covered in stickers that proclaims my laptop include an
<blockquote>AMD Athlon X2 processor, ATI Radeon video, Windows Vista powered with Dolby Surround Room for sound. Gateway was also nice enough to include an additional sticker that includes the specific stats and configuration.

The flair on the computer is one of those decisions that has, near as I can tell, zero redeeming benefit for the user. It appears to be 100%, wholly dedicated, to making a couple extra bucks for Gateway.  It’s hard to imagine the argument for how it could possibly benefit the user; if I were to try though I imagine it would be something like this:

No, no, no!! I’m telling you, the user’s going to need to know what video card they have in the computer at all times. No, I don’t think they need to know the model or anything to identify issues; knowing just the brand is all they need.

Ooh, it’d probably be a good idea to include as many stickers as possible too. Let’s be sure to include them for as many different components as possible. Oh yeah, it’s important to keep as little information on them as possible; just the brand logo if possible.

Silliness aside, I’m sure one of the arguments is cost; getting money from the hardware folks to put a sticker on a computer helps keep costs down. Well, fine but I just don’t care about the stickers. It makes the computer look like a freaking stock car and I like a clean computer.

There’s a nice article on how to remove the stickers that was pretty helpful on WikiHow. I went through the process laid out, and while a couple stickers were a little more trouble than others, it was a pretty straightforward process. Of course, now it’s going to be difficult to know what companies sponsored the computer but life goes on.

I guess I’ll just have to memorize that my computer has an AMD Athlon X2 processor with ATI Radeon video, Windows Vista powered with Dolby Surround Room for sound