Well – it was time for a new notebook. After Micah – my now 17 month old stood up on my Compaq notebook – it was all downhill from there. The USB ports on the back had been failing, the CD drive was dead, it would decide not to power up at all sometimes etc. So – I spent much effort these past few evenings trying to sort out a new laptop.

In my current situation – my desktop computers are in my bedroom. That said – most of my home computing time comes between the hours of 10 PM and 1 AM weekdays and during my kids nap time during the weekends. So – I cannot be in my bedroom… This means that I am ALWAYS on a notebook somewhere besides my bedroom – where my lovely wife Shannon and my 17 month old Micah still sleeps (When he is 2 my boys get bunk beds and share a room – we live in Brooklyn – space is a commodity.). So – Having an excellent notebook that I will be using 99% of the time from IN my house is key.

A few points that I considered. Notebooks tend to have sucky slow hard drives. I needed to either get a fast aftermarket drive – or better yet -a fast drive out of the box. I also want a large screen. I am used to developing with dual monitors. Working on a small screen is hard for me. I also need lots of the other #s.. mhz, mb, gb, rpm, etc. – just to support working, multitasking, developing, etc. I debated for a while between a 64 bit CPU and a dual core CPU. I really wanted a dual core 64 bit AMD cpu – but they are not out for notebooks yet (not from a real vendor at least). *The new desktop I am ordering in the next few weeks will be a dual core Amd 64 bit . In any case – my only real option was the Intel Core Duo. A video card – it is important to have a decent video card. I think people underrate the importance of a dedicated video card. Even more – people underestimate fast disk importance – so at least a 7200 RPM disk set was important to me as well.

So – my debate came down to the Dell Inspiron E1705 9400 2.0GHz and the HP dv8000t  also @ 2GHz. At the end of the day – I opted for the dell. As much as there are stories for ‘dead dells’ out there – there seem to be more (and more credible) stores regarding ‘bad HP notebooks’. My favorite set of debates was on a forum where people that were ‘tech support’ people at a University and at a Best Buy Geek Squad – talked about their experiences. In any case – here is what is coming new to my doorstep soon:

• Intel 2.0Ghz Core Duo T2500 Processor
• 17 inch Ultrasharp Wide Screen WUXGA Display with Truelife (1,920 by 1,200 pixels)
• 2 GIGS DDR2 (fast) 667Mhz SDRAM
• 100GB 7,200RPM SATA Hard Drive
• DVD+/-RW burner
• Internal Wireless 802.11 B/G
• 256MB nVidia GeForce Go 7800
• XP Pro SP2

Needless to say – I am like a kid waiting for Christmas now.

-Chris

No Responses to “New edition to my digital life”

1. Chris Donnan : Programming - Brooklyn Style - Yet another new edition to my digital life, on June 13th, 2006 at 13:28, said:
   

   [...] As I mentioned the other day – I just ordered a new notebook – fun. I also mentioned I would be ordering a new desktop soon – and that day has come. [...]

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