Welcome to Laptop Lane
This is the area where I share my adventures as a laptop road warrior. Like all computer wizards [sounds more refined then geek or nerd doesn't it?] you think you want one but you can't really outwardly justify spending all that money to just sit it in a travel bag and park it by the door awaiting that next vacation can you?
If we waited to justify anything based on vacation trips since retiring it would never happen. We justify things around here by want and do you have the money rules. That is why I put getting one off for over 20 years no real need or to darn tight to spend the money.
This past Christmas season saw a new need for a laptop on the horizon. What for or why? Why, a need of course, I have this little web design operation going on and I can't go anywhere without wondering, "Is it broken? Does one need updating? So there I was bitten by the bug but good!
The hunt started in a vicious circle of stores. Best Buy, Circuit City, Staples, and Office Depot. Beside visiting the physical store fronts we were also checking the on-line web stores for bargains. Best Buy eliminated themselves with their store help attitudes. If you weren't a young good looking female, blonde, and buxom they did not want to wait on you. Well, everyone knows I'm not young, darn sure not blonde unless you want to call grey - blonde and definitely not female. Circuit City slowly eliminated themselves with the in store help attitude also. Staples ran out of stock and Office Depot came through in the end with a helpful attitude, inventory and by beating everyone else on the last day with an additional $50 dollars off in store discount.
Came home with a Toshiba Satellite Model L25 S1215, 1.5 GHz Intel CPU, 256 meg RAM, 15 inch Bright vision screen, 40 Gigabyte HD, Microsoft XP Home OS amd built-in wireless. Since then we have added a travel bag, a port replicator, a wireless D-Link Router and 512 meg more RAM.
What is bad about the new laptops?
They don't come with all day long batteries any more. Maybe they never did but this one will perform for about and hour an a half then it takes a nap until you give it a dose of Vitamin AC/DC for two hours. But you can keep on working while it recharges the battery levels.
They also don't have parallel or serial ports any more. You get a couple of USB ports, a Network port, a Modem port, a Video output port, a power inlet port, headphone outlet and a microphone input hole. This one also has a S-video cable outlet for what ever S video is or does for you.
What is great about the new laptops?
They are lighter [almost no metal in them], quicker [those ultra fast CPU chips and 533 MHz forward busses], the screen colors are fantastic beyond belief. They don't need a mouse but touch pads suck overall if your a mouse or trackball freak like I am.
10.25.2007