New Laptop!

[bjarvis]

As mentioned previously, this past week in Denver made clear to me just how pitifully slow and annoying my old laptop has become.

Since this recent revelation, I've been looking on uBid.com and eBay.com for potential replacements, even bidding on a couple of models. Primarily, this laptop would be used for travel so I was looking for small and light: big LCD screens aren't useful to me. I want good battery life, a hard drive no smaller than 60 GB, a DVD playeer, built-in wifi (802.11a/b/g), at least 512 MB of RAM (1 GB preferred) and a CPU which can chug along at better than 1 GHz.

Today, I found one at a nearby pawn shop, next door to the 7-11 which I was visiting to purchase Coffee Crisp bars for cuyahogarvr.

I now have a Sony Vaio VGN-S460P. It has 512 MB of RAM, an 80 GB hard drive, the required wireless built-in facilities, DVD+/-RW and a 13.3" screen. All for $600 USD.

I've cleaned up the hard drive, removed a tonne of applications which Sony prefers to ship (any traces of AOL, etc.) and am now downloaded a mess of Windows patches. In a few more minutes, I'll have Norton Antivirus installed too; then I can start adding my preferred applications.

Whee!

Comments

[manley1.livejournal.com]

As you saw from my previous posts, I am super mega happy with my new pretty MacBook Pro. Once you go Mac, babe... ;)

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

I like kent4str's Mac Book... it's a nice machine and I'm currently writing this post with my iMac.

That said, $600 < $2000. :-)

[manley1.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it was a bitch to cough up the extra money, but I heart my little Pretty. Actually, I like it much better than my last few ThinkPads, all of which had something about their layout that aggravated my tendon problems in my hands/wrists. For me, that was worth the money. :-)

[apparentparadox]

Um, Norton? Why???? We've been running AVG and are very happy (much less of a memory hog).

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

I get a steep discount via my office and it's what we already had installed on our other Windows boxes. I'm also more familiar with it than AVG so there's a comfort factor, although any software which does the job would be fine with me.

[apparentparadox]

We had a lot of problems with Norton, so we switched to AVG and have been very happy. Free is even cheaper than steeply discounted, by the way.

Good on you, sweetie

[smartblackdick.livejournal.com]

I am happy for you that this process was as easy as this. Getting the right computer at the right price, with the bells and whistles you want can be a pain in the caboose.

[trawnapanda.livejournal.com]

question for clarification:

is "how pitifully slow my old laptop has become" a whinge about speed that has decreased over time (that is, length of time to execute some specific task is greater in 2007 than it was several years ago); or is it a whinge that "new computers can do these tasks faster than my old computer could do it". Has the laptop slowed down, like a puppy getting older and grey about the muzzle; or have your expectations of speed increased?

I say this as someone who once played "Frogger" on a PET computer in the early 80s, and the game was on a cassette tape and took 20min to load before you could play it.

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

The machine has been getting slower as Windows accumulates crap in its directories and registries. As well, XP is more demanding on RAM than Win98 was so the machine is distinctly slower. The hard drive was filling quickly whenever I offloaded photos from my camera too. While I could upgrade both the RAM and the hard drive, the combo would cost most of the price of a newer used machined.