Hello from my brand new notebook...Plum and I picked up our paychecks this morning (by "paycheck" I mean "large suspicious stack of roubles"), then she came with me to the computer store. After much deliberation (Me: "Well this one has 20 more gigs of hard drive space and a built in webcam but this one can write DVDs but I don't think I'll really use that plus it weighs a fifth of a kilogram more and the sheet says this is the same size but I think it looks bigger do you think it looks bigger?" Plum: "Maybe...Do you really need that much hard drive space? Look, this one has bluetooth."...20 minutes later...Me: "This one's pretty." Plum: "Yeah. Yeah that's important. You want something you want to look at." Me: "And the screen lights up." Plum: "Yes, yes it does...") I picked an Acer PC.

We brought it home and spent the last 3 hours trying to connect it to the internet (Windows Vista is horridly confusing, especially when everything's in Russian). We bumbled through about a dozen different error messages and finally got it connected. I'm really grateful to her for sticking it out with me. Without her I'd still be lost in the Russian-English dictionary, or back at the store telling the guy something like "I can't in internet, maybe you help?"

Best of all, the screen lights up, the battery lasts more than 3 minutes, and I can turn it off secure in the knowledge it'll turn back on again! Yessss.