Holly has my previous laptop...a four-year-old DELL Inspiron 9100 hand-me-down with 2.80 GHz Intel Pentium 4.

Today, she tried downloading an iTunes movie that is 2.42 GB. After three hours at home, she had only acquired 20 MB of the movie (that's .8% of the movie, by the way) on a 7 Mb home hookup.

I took the DELL to work to see if a T1 connection would increase the download speed. Not much improvement...she still would've needed an additional 238 HOURS to finish.

I carried the download over to my two-year-old MacBook Pro. On the same T1 connection, the 2.42 GB movie took only 115 minutes to download.

TWO YEARS of technology was the difference between a 14,280-minute download time and 115 minutes. Definitely a sign of the times.

And I won't even go into the PC vs. Mac debate...