A New Laptop--and back to Windows 7

At the end of July, through an unusual series of circumstances, the IBM Thinkpad laptop I had been given by a friend in my church over a year before was stolen from the student lounge in the Kisber Memorial Library Building at Nashville State Community College. My copy of PrintMusic 2007, which was in the bag I had been using to carry the laptop, was also stolen. To say the least, I felt as though I had been violated! Naturally, I reported the theft to school security, but I have yet to hear anything from them.

Through the generosity of my former employer's son and daughter, I have now been given a new laptop (as before, new to me!). It's a Gateway 450ROG, with a Pentium 4 CPU @ 1.7 Ghz., 512 MB of RAM, a 20 GB hard drive--AND internal Wi-Fi! Thanks to the higher clock speed of the CPU, I was able to resume using Windows 7 RC1 as my operating system, at least for the next year. Due to the comparatively small size of the internal hard drive, however, I cannot, at this time, use a dual-boot setup with any distro of Linux. Hopefully, I will be able to swap out the current primary hard drive for a much larger one at some point in the future. In the meantime, I will use portable external hard drives for additional storage.

Also, I am currently exploring the use of music notation software OTHER than PrintMusic, due primarily to the latter's annoying habit of requiring the program to be "re-authorized" after ANY change is made in the contents of the hard drive on which it is installed--even after defragging! While I understand the concern of Coda Technology (PrintMusic's publisher) as to software piracy and the like, nevertheless I find this "solution" to be unacceptable--even paranoid! If the company does not find some other means of resolving this concern, in my opinion, they will be cutting their own corporate throats in the long term, as sooner or later customers will become too fed up with such draconian measures to put up with them any longer. Hopefully, I will be able to find an alternative music notation package that will not insist on such a paranoid approach to software security. Whether that package will run under Windows or Linux remains to be seen. Stay tuned!