So here I am at the Subaru dealership, having turned our ‘02 Forester over for an oil change and lube and also to have the service technicians check out a jerkiness that has developed in the transmission.
I thought I noticed a problem a week or so ago and it was particularly pronounced on the interstate drive to the dealership, which is about 30 miles from my home.
The interstate was full of cars and trucks all headed the same way I was and it made for lots of changes in speed - plenty of acceleration and deceleration. When I let off the gas at 80mph, the severity of the engine braking felt more like I was driving a standard transmission vehicle. At other speeds, the transmission seemed to be “searching” for the right gear. There was also a noticeable lag between the time I pressed on the accelerator and when the vehicle responded. This all probably adds up to something very expensive, but I fervently hope not.
That’s because of this Sony VAIO FS660 notebook computer I’m using at the moment.
Maria and I had been having notebook thoughts for a long time, but two things pushed us over the edge.
My son Steve showed us his new Apple Powerbook G4 with all of its slick software weekend before last when we visited him and his family.
Our friend Rich, a world-class photojournalist who is recently expanding his wedding photography business as a means of escaping from Gannett wage slavery, told us how he uses a notebook as a powerful selling tool. After the wedding ceremony, he downloads his photos to his notebook computer, then sets it up to play the pictures as a slideshow at the reception. He puts a stack of his business cards next to the notebook.
So after Maria’s quilt shop visit last Saturday, we went computer shopping. Fresh in my mind were an admonition from my computer guru friend Tim that all of my software investments have been in Windows format and the recollection of having seen a really killer photo demo running on Sony VAIOs on a couple of occasions.
A visit to the nearest Best Buy gave us a chance to compare notebook screens and the VAIO was the brightest and sharpest of the bunch. So we pulled the trigger.
I’m what you might call a decisive shopper. I go into the marketplace with a fairly clear idea of what I want, can assimilate the data at hand quickly and don’t take long to make a decision. I have friends who seem to enjoy prolonging the shopping process - endlessly weighing the pros and cons of various products and to-ing and fro-ing from one store to another in a protracted search for the best deal.
The older I get, the more aware I am that time is the only irreplaceable commodity I have, so I’ve become increasingly concerned about wasting time. I guess I’d rather waste money than time. Sounds like an Attention Deficit Disorder issue, doesn’t it?
Anyhow, I figured we could use the VAIO right now. We have a wedding coming up on the 25th and want to leave immediately afterward for our photo vacation in the West. The VAIO will let us do the Rich-style slideshow at the reception and, with its wifi capability, will let us edit the wedding pictures on the road and upload them to our online sales site, probably from somewhere in Missouri or Kansas.
Since there is a bit of a learning curve involved, the sooner we get our hands on a notebook computer and get familiar with it, the better off we’ll be, I reasoned. Fortunately, Maria thinks about this the same way I do and we were congratulating ourselves on our decisiveness as we carried our new VAIO from Best Buy to our car.
We were eager to see if our photos display as well as the VAIO demo shots. They do! It’s an absolutely spectacular display. Rich uses a 17” Powerbook, but we settled for a 15.4” screen after deciding that the 17” notebook is a bit unwieldy and that extra 1.6” isn’t worth the extra money to us.
So what we got is 1 gigabyte of RAM, an 80 gig hard drive and a really fast (I forget how fast) Intel Centrino processor which the sales guy says is much easier on power consumption than other processors. The estimated battery life on a charge is between 5 and 6 hours.
Maria had been agitating for a portable DVD player for her birthday (which was yesterday) and, since this plays DVDs magnificently and on a much bigger screen, she’s a happy camper and is looking forward to traveling with it.
The touchpad substitute for a mouse is a little hard to get used to, but I’m sure I can master it. I recall my friend Tim bought a mouse for his first laptop, but the last time I looked, he was no longer mousing. I miss the mouse mostly when I’m doing a lot of point-and-click fixes in Photoshop.
The ergonomics of the keyboard have forced me to take off my watch while typing for fear the stainless steel bracelet band on my Breitling Chrono Avenger will scar the area below the keypad.
On another front, I finally heard from my tenant who had asked me to hold her rent check until her next paycheck on June 10. After I called and left a voicemail for her on Friday noting that I had not yet seen this check I was supposed to be holding, she phoned on Saturday afternoon to tell me she’d spaced it - actually she was planning to give it to me in person when I came up to clean the gutters - a task I haven’t been able to perform since I haven’t been able to borrow my father-in-law’s pickup truck to haul a ladder to the house. She assured me it was now in the mail and that she had added $25 as a late fee.
I’m relieved, but I will be even more relieved if I find the check in my mailbox when I get home from Subaruland. My experience with the Tenant from Hell prior to this one has left me extremely nervous about this whole landlord thing.
Maria’s daughter bought her a new wallet/checkbook combo for Maria’s birthday because she’s a conscientious girl who takes after her mother. Her son, who takes after his idiot father, returned Maria’s phone call yesterday, but made no mention of her birthday. We’re sure he has no idea that his mother had a birthday. She misses him since he moved to his father’s house after graduation, but I must confess I don’t. I wish him well, but my goal in life right now is a truly empty nest.
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We dodged the bullet on the Subaru transmission. The service manager test drove the car and said the lack of smoothness is a common thing for Foresters with 70,000 or more miles (88,000 on ours) and he’s never seen a transmission fail as a consequence of this symptom. So I got off with just $20.80 for the oil change and lube.
However, there is a lubricant leak around the timing belt. The service guys said I should plan to change the timing belt at the next oil change - 91,000 mles - which will be on the other end of our photo trek through the West.
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