A little under a year ago, I took my first venture into Windows computing at home with the purchase of my first laptop, an HP with Window Vista on board. Despite it having a 2 gig ram and dual core processor, at times it drives me nuts. Vista is such a slug, its slow, and very hard drive and memory hungry.
About 9 months ago I invested in an Asus 900 netbook. Oh what a dream machine. Its quick, compact and handles many routine tasks as well or better than my HP. Lack of hard disc is not a problem as I uses USB memory keys and a portable hard drive, mainly to make data transportable. It runs on Xandros, a Linux distro which, compared to Vista, flies along. But it has one drawback. Installing or updating programs is a pain in the backside most of the time, often requiring tinkering under the hood.
Then, by chance, a friend was disposing of his IBM T41 ThinkPad and docking station at a bargain price. Its 5 years old and has only an 11 gig HD, and a Centrino 1.6 mHz processor, otherwise its in very good cosmetic and functional order. Now I have 3 laptops! But the one I use most is the ThinkPad!
Old it might be, relatively slow and short on HD space, but it is a dream to use. It runs Windows XP, solid and reliably, has a beautiful keyboard, is fully wireless enabled, the connectivity of a desktop in the dock, and now with a new high capacity battery runs for almost 5hrs between charges. That’s the beauty of it, loaded with only the essential programs I actually use, the reason why it was a shit load of money when new is still evident when stacked up against some of its modern counterparts with uprated everything. Its a joy to use!
To counter the lack of hard drive space on board, I use memory keys and portable HD to transport data or use many of the on-line storage spaces that give me data and photo storage access via the www. Do I really need to carry over 100gigs of stuff I'm not gonna use today around on my laptop's hard disc? I don’t think so, not these days anyway. My Asus taught me that!
With my USB modem that uses my phone network to connect to the web, I have 24/7 broadband data access from almost anywhere in the UK via the internet.
My Asus is now used as the true portable where size and weight is at a premium. The HP, for data heavy net use and image processing. Otherwise the ThinkPad T41, the granddad in the stable, is just too beautifully made and great to use to be confined to the cupboard.
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