This weekend I broke down and bought a new laptop. I'll spare you the un-boxing experience.
I was looking to replace a six year old machine that - to say the least - had got to be a bit long in the tooth. It was having a hard time just running XP and a light weight browser such as Chrome. The battery was shot and it needed to be tethered to the wall outlet for any use at all. I don't travel that much and most of my "real" work is done on a desktop with plenty of juice. The laptop was for those times when I was away from the desktop, even if it was just in the living room watching tv and wanting to catch up on e-mail, do some browsing, light weight word processing and spreadsheets, maybe some basic photo editing.
Initially I looked at some of the netbooks from HP and Acer. All of these seemed to be cut from the same template - Atom processor, 1 GB memory, 160 GB hard drive, 10.1" screen size, etc. While the machines were attractive for their small size and portability, the minimal specs began to concern me as I thought more about it. I didn't expect to do too much more on this machine, but I didn't want it to become too bogged down too soon as Windows became bigger with more updates and applications got fatter. Also the small size struck me as.... small. While its very portable, the keyboard seemed cramped and I wondered how functional it would be for extended periods of time. And the small screen size was a bit much for my old eyes.
This Toshiba seemed to fit the bill for me near perfectly. The size is a nice compromise between the netbooks portability and the size of the bigger laptops. The keyboard is very functional (for a laptop - its still not a desktop keyboard). The Celeron is no dual-core processor, but combined with the 2GB of memory makes for a snappy experience. Windows 7 is running nicely and the connection to the household wifi could not have been simpler.
What is really impressing me is the battery life. Toshiba bills it as 8-9 hours and it looks like they ain't fibbin'. I'm still on my first charge and have used the machine quite a bit over the last 24 hours, just putting it in "sleep" mode when I close the lid between sessions. This was a deal maker for me as I really like the idea of going all day with just a laptop and not a laptop and power cord w/brick. Grab the thing, stuff it in my bag and go. No waiting on shut down or boot up.
And the $450 price tag was just sweet.
No comments:
Post a Comment