The mother board and processor on my faithful laptop have died (thankfully the hard drive survives) and its time to find a replacement. I dread the hours of endless comparisons ahead and the probably inevitable move to the new windows. I also dread the unexpected expense. Oh well, fresh start time. I know I want/need a big screen and plenty of processing power, other than that all bets are off. Wish me luck.
__________________ "If a man does not have an ideal and try to live up to it, then he becomes a mean, base and sordid creature, no matter how successful." Letter to his son Kermit, quoted in Theodore Roosevelt by Joseph Bucklin Bishop, 1915
Consumer Reports, most recent issue, has a review of laptops. I've been thinking about a fairly high-end model with 17" screen. (I can't see poop on smaller screens.) They like the Toshiba. Always get as much processing power and memory as you can possibly afford.
I wouldn't fear Vista unless you've got a bunch of peripheral stuff of older vintage, where drivers can be difficult to locate. Maria's computer died and had Vista with the new machine. It's been free of problems (indeed, more problem-free than my XP machine.) Only thing to remember is that Vista is indeed a different OS from XP, so go in with the expectation of learning the new OS. No big deal.
Thank heavens your hard disk made it through. Similar thing happened when Maria's machine died, though it was thankfully the data half of her partitioned HD (her old D: drive) that made it through. I was able to wire the HD into my desktop and read everything.
When my old ThinkPad died, I salvaged the hard drive, and got a hard drive enclosure for it. I was able to retrieve the data from it, and now have an 80 Gb external drive. (both good things). I don't have any experience with Macs, and won't pretend to know. Rich Luhr was here last weekend with his Mac laptop, and he says he loves it. The only thing I can tell you about it was it was silver and white.
Marie's laptop is an Acer, widscreen, dvd burner, yada yada, with a 160 Gb hard drive. She likes it, but for some reason, when typing with it your left hand touches the "ctrl" button too easily. Hitting "control" and other keys can have some interesting results...
TigerDirect has a Acer 15.4" pentium dual core with 3 Gig of memory (webcam, dvd burner, Vista) for $599 on special. The ad just came out this morning and is one heck of a deal... if I needed yet another laptop I be buying one myself.
While I've heard good things about Acer from folks at work... I've just took a friend's apart to fix a broken power connector about a month ago and it was quite well designed and constructed. I was so impressed I just bought a Acer Aspire netbook for $350 as Costco for roaming around on vacation.
I'm a long-time PC user, but my next laptop will be the new MacBook Pro. Now that they can run both the Mac OS as well as Windows, I see no reason to stick with Windows PC's. My current machine is an Acer Aspire with 17" screen and a dedicated video card (not a fan of video integrated into the motherboard - not enough juice to run AutoCad). My brother is a graphic designer and has always used Macs. I'm impressed with their build quality and their apparent longevity. I'm willing to spend a bit more to give it a go. Since my screen is starting to fail, I suspect I'll be doing this sooner than later.
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Cameron & the Labradors
Kai & Samm
North Vancouver, BC
Canada
We have 2 Macs at home, and I have been begging for one for work. Heck our IS department removed Vista from this ThinkPad because of all the problems. Our Macs are fast, clean looking and don't need all that PC protection stuff.
Again MAC is the way to go
Ed the old PC guy who is willing to dress Mac
Seconded! Once you go Mac, you'll never go back.... They offer a 15" and a 17". I use the 17" for my photos, and my husband loves his 15" for music and movie downloads. We are both recent converts. Besides...it matches your Airstream
I just wanted to offer a suggestion about screen size. You can save a few dollars by going with a 13 or 15" screen rather than 17". An option is to pick up an LCD monitor in the size that you like for doing the bulk of your work. I find my 17" laptop too heavy to be truly mobile. My next machine will be the 15" weighing in at about 4.5 pounds vs. the 7+pounds of my current machine.
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Cameron & the Labradors
Kai & Samm
North Vancouver, BC
Canada
Sorry for your loss - it reminds me how poor I've been about backing-up, but at least your hard drive is OK. Maybe your old hard drive, in an enclosure, can serve has an external back-up drive for your new computer.
I have an HP 17" notebook with Vista. I have no complaints about Vista (except the annoying security "are you sure?" messages) but I do not like the highly reflective plasma-like coating on my HP screen. Also, if you are tempted, the HP TV tuner card that came with it never performed well (I planned on using my notebook as my trailer TV).
The 17" is awkward and would not be good if you do a lot of airport travel; in the trailer, and occasional airport travel, it is fine and the screen size is great, especially for DVDs.
MS Office 2007 - now that is a different story. Word is now very hard to use, at least for someone accustomed to Office 2003 or earlier. And it uses a new file format so others can't read your files unless they have Word 2007, a down-loadable reader, or you save your file in Word 2003 format.
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Roseville, CA
I have an HP 17" notebook with Vista. I have no complaints about Vista (except the annoying security "are you sure?" messages) but I do not like the highly reflective plasma-like coating on my HP screen. Also, if you are tempted, the HP TV tuner card that came with it never performed well (I planned on using my notebook as my trailer TV).
MS Office 2007 - now that is a different story. Word is now very hard to use, at least for someone accustomed to Office 2003 or earlier. And it uses a new file format so others can't read your files unless they have Word 2007, a down-loadable reader, or you save your file in Word 2003 format.
Most laptops are available with the non-glare screen as an option.
I find the $300+ that Microsoft wants for many versions of Office expensive at best, and ludicrous in most other cases.
I use Open Office for my Word-type applications, and it works very well, plus it's free.
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