Time for a new toy
I’ve managed to last 7 months without a laptop. I’m sure this has helped me build character, and fend off carpal tunnel, and decrease my chances of being reincarnated as a piece of beige office furniture. But now the call of the wild has become too strong for me to resist, and it’s time to re-equip.
Does anyone have recommendations or anti-recs to share on recent laptop purchases?
In the past I’ve been happy with Toshiba. I’m looking for: something fairly well loaded in terms of hardware; fast enough to compile code without screeching to a halt; high quality screen, low glare; good power mgmt; 60gb+ for toting music and pictures around; and reasonable robustness (while I deny being clumsy, my mother still won’t let me wash dishes at her place).
Look and feel matters too… I don’t want to stare at an ugly brick all day. I pray for the day when a PC OEM will finally have the guts to design something approaching the Mac in aesthetics. On that note I will consider a Mac, but I do suffer from delusions of coding again, and that biases me towards a Windows box where I am more at home with the popular dev tools.
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Andrew Cencini said,
March 9, 2006 @ 1:57 pm
Hey Osh,
I have a ThinkPad T43 which has revitalized my love for mobile computing. 3 or 4 years of a wimpy tablet PC almost did me in, but this new laptop really has made things a lot better. It’s no Mac in terms of aesthetics, but, hey, black is the new black! I’ve been very pleased with the durability, horsepower, and simplicity of the system - I can code on a laptop again :)
If you do go with a Mac, you can always use Eclipse for development. I love VS and am super happy with it, but have to admit we have some very good competition going on there.
Have been enjoying your blog for a while (I’ve got you hooked in as a live.com feed) - good luck picking out a new laptop!
Later,
–andrew
Oshoma Momoh said,
March 10, 2006 @ 10:48 am
Thanks Andrew, and great hearing from you! I’ve been, err, thinking about the ThinkPad too. You may tip me over the edge.
James said,
March 10, 2006 @ 12:17 pm
I’ve been happy with my Toshiba (I think it’s one of the older A75’s - I call it the Giant Blue Clam). I traded off cost, weight and battery life for having similar-to-desktop processing power and a nice wide screen. I can plug it in, I need the exercise and could use the savings on cash to buy software - the most important thing was that it could do all the things my desktop can do (real-time sound/video processing) at a gig.
Rehan said,
March 10, 2006 @ 12:25 pm
Well, you said “I don’t want to stare at an ugly brick all day.” so I would not recommend the T43 (I have a T41 and love it, but I’m the kind that doesn’t mind bricks). Take a look at the Z60m…it’s a bit nicer looking and offers more screen real estate.
Aaron said,
March 11, 2006 @ 3:46 am
Been backpacking with my trusty refurbished dell x1. Been super solid, very light and very small. I run SQL 2k, VS, Office, Itunes concurrently with no problems. Onboard SD and compact flash readers make it a media vacum. Solid, solid, solid.
No dvd player nor burner to save space. No fan either.
Sven said,
March 13, 2006 @ 8:49 pm
In the last year we’ve purchased a sony vaio and a dell based on recommendations from others (including Wentz who’s bought a number of them for MS). Very happy with both. It seems as though Dells have become much more reliable in the past few years. And if you watch www.gotapex.com you can find them for 30-40% off occasionally (there’s some deal posted there now which looks pretty good).
Rehan said,
April 26, 2006 @ 5:56 pm
Osh,
Did you already decide on a laptop? You’ve probably noticed by now the MacBook Pro with the Intel Core Duo processor… with Boot Camp ( http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/ ), you can have have your Mac aesthetics and run WinXP on it, too.
My Own Pirate Radio » Asus W3V Notebook Rocks said,
May 10, 2006 @ 7:13 pm
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