Secret47

I'm finally up to the point in my savings where I can seriously start looking for laptops. I'm looking at Toshiba, as they seem to be up on the current technology, and have pretty good prices. HP/Compaq seems to be lagging a bit behind. I know better than to look at Dell, and Gateway doesn't seem to be a whole lot better.

I'd like to try a tablet, but I have yet to find a retailer that still has a pen with their display models. I wonder how much I would use the tablet features, though, and if it would justify the extra cost over a good standard laptop. No tablets out right now really justify the extra cost, with the exception of refurbished models. This might change, though, as Toshiba has a new Satellite tablet on the way. That'll probably be my decision maker on if I go for it, or a regular notebook instead.

Ah well, just wanted to rant about that. Those of you I IM regurally are quite familar with this.

It didn't take me long to make my decision. I decided against a tablet/convertable and went for a regular laptop. Ultimately I just couldn't justify the extra expense for a feature I'd rarely use.

I got myself a Toshiba Satellite A105-2031. It's crazy how much laptops have dropped in price in just the past couple years. I got this one for $730, and there's a $150 rebate as well. It's got a Celeron M 390 (1.7 ghz), 512 megs of DDR2 PC4200 memory, a 60 gig 5400 rpm SATA hard drive, a standard DVD/CD-RW combo drive, and ATI X200 graphics. There was another Toshiba that was essentially identical to this one, but it had a 100 gb hard drive and a DVD multi-format burner with double-layer support. It was going for $900 and only had a $50 rebate. So I decided to go for this one. Celerons are a LOT faster than they used to be. With a full meg of L2 cache, it's no slouch.

It's got some nice features, like a hardware wireless switch, hardware volume control, and it'll play DVD's and CD's without having to boot up the OS. And I love the touchpad, it just works so well.

Anyway, photos to come later.

Ewwww...celeron processor. Unless the new M ones don't suck.

Trust me, the M's rock. They're all built on the new 90nm cores and have a full meg of L2 cache. Sadly, it's almost as fast as my AMD 64 with applications. Some of the celeron M's are even built on the brand-new 65nm cores. Pentium M's stop at 90nm. The only other difference I can see is that the Pentium M's also come with two megs of L2 cache.

--edit--

The ATI X200 graphics chip does suck in 3D. That doesn't really matter, though. The GeForce 7800 in my tower can run anything I throw at it.