So, you're moving to a foreign country (eventually - bloody slow immigration people at the US embassy bah humbug), and you have a dilemma. When you get there you need to be working immediately, at the very least on your book. What that means is that you need a computer that can run a resolution where 120 DPI for screenshots is not constraining, which has oodles of disk space, and which is capable of running virtual machines at a useable speed.
So, you look at shipping out one of your massive towers from the UK and find out that the cost of shipping airfreight (cos it needs to get there fast) is probably more than the cost of buying a new machine. What to do?
It's long been a dream of mine to have an office consisting of nothing but notebooks. I figured the best set up would be a cool desktop replacement notebook that I could lump around if I needed to, backed up by my Acer Tavelmate C111 Tablet (tiny, lightweight, sexy and MINE). The problem is, that desktop replacement notebooks aren't really desktop replacements. You always had to sacrfice something, like power, or disk space, nd even then you'd end up with a laptop the weight of a small child than generates more heat than Dr. Otto Octavius' Fusion reaction experiments. Well, until now.
You see it turns out there's a bunch of companies out there that actually do now make real desktop replacement notebooks. In fact, one company at least (Dell) actually makes a notebook where vital components (video card, hard disk etc) can even be easily upgraded - the Inspiron 9100. In the States there's even a gamer version called the Inspiron XPS that has cool snap on graphics for the cover (but I don't really want to walk into a client office in the States and whip out a notebook adorned with skulls). So, I've made the leap and ordered one. Not sure yet what's going to happen to the towers here, in particular the Alienware ones, but I do know they are going somehow.
The new notebook is a 3.2Ghz Prescott Pentium 4 (not sure why it's called a Prescott chip other than the Deputy Prime Minsiter here in England is a fat blimp and so I'm guessing the new Pentium 4 is also a fat blimp), with a gig of memory, 80 gig internal hard disk, 250 gig external USB 2 hard disk, a 256 Meg Radeon 9800 and a built in subwoofer. It really does weigh a small child at 9lbs in weight, without the huge power adapter, but I'm happy. At last I can have a primary machine that is a notebook, and that means tidy offices, and mobile offices. It runs at a ridiculous resolution which means I can switch it into 120DPI for screenshots for the book (which by the way is coming along great), and it's got enough grunt in it to run virtual machines at a decent speed while still working on other software in the background. When I get enough spare cash saved up I'll upgrade the memory to at least 2 gig, and then I'm all set.
Now, when it finally gets built and makes it way here, I also to get to see if a notebook really can play Doom 3 ;)
2:59:09 PM 
|
|
