Bleh

Feel better this evening now after settling down and having something to eat.

Experimented with Windows 7 multitouch courtesy of a cheap Dell Latitude XT off Ebay (bought using proceeds from Ebay sales) and it's quite interesting. Not as smooth as an iPad but quite usable. The XT came out in 2008 and was very expensive, but is probably one of the fastest depreciating computers made. Mine is 18 months old and I paid probably 10% of the original sale price and it still has 18 months warranty left. It has a dual-mode N-trig touch screen which responds to both finger touch and the included stylus. It's not perfect, definitely a little quirky, but works surprisingly well. Also, unlike most modern touchscreens, it has a matt finish. It's actually quite nice how the touch screen can be used while it's in the laptop configuration too, just for quickly scrolling or selecting something.

Strange to think that the machines I now use all the time, including the XT, are all running a 64-bit operating system with gigs of RAM and multiple core processors. This level of computing power seems unreal, but at the same time, you'd expect such power to give incredible performance, but because software is bulkier, it doesn't seem that way. Back in the days of the Pentium II, I remember reading about a guy who ran Windows 3.11 and Office 6 when Windows 98 and Office 97 were current, because it was so much faster. Oh well.