Easiest Laptop Setup. Ever.

I've been amazed at how easily I've been able to get up to speed on using my new Dell Vostro laptop.

There are a few factors for this. First off, the majority of content I use daily is stored in The Cloud. Be it: subversion for code, Google Docs for documents, a Wiki for TODO items and so on. So, getting access to it from the new laptop required little more than a few cygwin utilities and a web browser.

Next, there's the fact that I compiled a cheat sheet of software I need to install. This means that I can do a single cygwin install, rather than having to keep returning to the setup process to get yet another utility.

But the real winner for this experience has been Carbonite. I had been using Carbonite as my backup solution on my old Dell.

I simply logged in to my Carbonite account on my new laptop, and hit the big o'l Transfer button. It asked me a handful of questions, and then it went to work restoring my files from the latest backup. After a few days, all 266,842 files had been copied over and my new laptop was completely up to speed. Amazing.

Had this been a disaster recovery scenario, I suppose I would have been a bit bummed out about waiting a few days for all the files to transfer. But, getting everything over is just remarkable in and of itself. I've never had that easy a time transferring files to my new setup.

As for the laptop itself - I'm liking it. It Just Works. In fact, it feels like I don't even have a new laptop, which is the best feeling I could ask for.