Christmas presents

Just cash and gift cards, my prefered gift items.

40GB iPod + $15 gift card to iTunes Music Store... which currently isn't working

photo-quality printer with scanner/card reader

Family Guy Season 3 DVD set
Simpsons Season 4 DVD Set
Monty Python's The Meaning Of Life DVD

And a bunch of unimportant stuff

Clothes... you know how that goes, but I did get some cool pants that apperantly are all the rage in Equador (my sister just got back from studying there).

I also got hockey skates , food , an awsome "Everyone Loves a SLOVAK Boy" shirt, a laser mouse (my old ball one was sticking really bad, and I can't get it clean), and a 7" portable DVD player! (I asked for a 30 iRock Mp3 Player!). It plays DVDs, CDs, and even Pirated DVD's from Equador (I'm watching gangs of New York right now!). It doesn't play Mp3 cd's though . But it's still awsome, and it will help with long car rides to NJ (I'm in WI)

Wow! Some of you were very good this year

I got some sweaters, a new cordless phone with answering machine built in, some books, a couple of CD's.... mostly little things like that. I did get $50 from my grandpa and I have some stuff to return too, so I'm thinking of geting a digtal camera with the proceeds Will ask about that in computer help.

My mom got the big tech toy this year - a new laptop! I've been busy helping her set it up. Oh, and I also got a webcam so I can talk to my mom & my sister in video My sister got the webcams first and mom & I thought it would be cool if we all had them.

I didnt get anything so went out and brought myself a new mig welder and digital camera

I got chocolates and a Guiness book of records 2005

Update: Now returned IBM speech recognition on account of it completely not working....
Found an uponened present...(very suspicious) which was Private Eye annual (do they have Private Eye in the US? - I guess the Brits will have heard of it)
And by the way, i got a DAB digital radio!

OFF TOPIC: Just been looking at sitebug: Renegade, are you really Cheng Eu Chew?

Well, I didn't think that Kiwis called their children Chinese sounding names. Some kind of tradition or what?

New Zealand is built up of mixed races nowadays, more pacific culture but with solid Asian population - like any country, there is a wide mixture of cultures

This shiny new computer!

A big step up from an old old Compaq Cyrix11 366.

Gateway? Never heard of them. I would only trust buying from a reputable company.

You've never heard of Gateway? Seriously?

Well, no. I am in the UK, though.

Gateway is in the top 5 of computer manufacturers in the US
I'd rank their customer service a bit higher than Dell, but quality is slightly lower.

My 3rd most recent (and 2nd to last PC) computer was a Gateway... it lasted 3 years in full use, then was relegated to college use for 2 years, and was retired.
Then the Dell came and lasted 3 years before dying altogether.

That annoying Gateway cow-box is still in the basement, holding a 1985 dot-matrix printer

That's one thing I can say about that old poopy Compaq, it's still going, and my kid now has it. I got it in 1998, had one hard drive bite the dust, but that was replaced and it's still going.

Gateway is one the of biggest computer manufacturers in the States. I've got a '97 Gateway 2000 with a P2 that's still running strong.

Oh well. i guess its just not in the uK.
I have a HP pavilion t459.uk

when i got it, like a year ago I found it was reall fast but now it seems so slow. It seems that all computers seem slow after they get old.

anyway, as a laptop is compulsory at my next school and we haven't got one, it looks like a new one could be on the way...

This is just a guess (or a grudge) but, on Windows, when one first gets a fresh, new computer, it will seem fast because there is hardly anything on it.
People will, of course, start installing their programs on it which will add their own programs to the start up process. If you have even 5 programs taking up time loading useless things at startup, then, obviously, it is going to slow down the computer.
This is of course, disregarding all the memory intensive programs slowing down the computer and sucking up unnessary memory...

We ended up having to return th original laptop because it was some store brand with a crappy screen. Now we have a nice Toshiba,. I'll have to look up the specific model on eopinions but they seemed to have mostly 4-5 * ratings on the Toshiba's.

The only noticeable slowdown on my computer is when I have 99% or more of my RAM used up, and virtual memory is over 1GB.

OS X handles it exceptionally well

My computer was purchased in March 2003... and its still running sexily sweet

Yeah, I have installed a lot of stuff!