Ah, well, my impetuosity got the better of me. We'll see what crashes after it finishes uninstalling.

edit: What I should really uninstall is The Sims Complete, but I keep thinking I'm going to play it.

Hopefully nothing will crash.

Hivemind question cross-posted with Natter:

Has anyone read any good articles or papers or whatever on the future of mobile devices recently?

Perkins,

I think Diane Riehm had a radio show on this topic earlier this year.

you might want to search gizmodo or engadget and see if you can come up with something. Oh! Wired too.

Thanks!

So the replacement AC adpater for my HP Mini that I order through amazon arrived today. [link] It looks virtually the same as my previous adapter, except it's a two prong plug instead of a grounded three prong plug. Should I worry about this? Am I exposing my netbook (house?) to a higher risk of damage? I suspect it's a knockoff or a refurb, even though it was sold as "genuine."

Is one prong wider than the other? Do your outlets have one slot wider than the other so that the plug can only go in one way? If the answer to both questions is yes, then you've got nothing to worry about. Everything is correctly grounded.

I am posting this from the espresso machine MacBook Pro. It started up fine after >100 hours of being off and inverted in a cool, ventilated room.

Regular backups are definitely in order, though, since I have no way of knowing whether it's all really okay. (But hell, I should be backing up regularly anyway; I backed up the old laptop anywhere from every 1-2 weeks. I think I need to back this one up more frequently. Fortunately it has Time Machine on it, so that will be easy. Although it was easy on the old laptop, too; I just used Carbon Copy Cloner software.)

And related to backups, I have a question that reveals my lack of knowledge: is it common for external hard drives to have an AC adaptor for power? The external hard drive I was using to back up my iBook is 160 GB and probably 3 years old, and it was powered through the laptop's USB port.

I don't really care if it's common for the external hard drives to have AC adaptors; I just didn't realize that they did. t /living under a technological rock

Yay!

Yes, my external hard drive is ac powered. But, you know, it's in the closet in the media room, and completely untethered to any computer directly, because I am the kind of geek who put ethernet ports in her closets.

I'm not sure it is common, but some of the bigger external hard drives typically need more than the USB port for power. Like getting into the multiple terabyte category.

I have a 1TB hard drive that does just fine from the USB port.