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

[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.