The Aerie

What Laptop Should I Get?

So I'm in the market for a new laptop, having given my aging Thinkpad T40 to my mother for Christmas. She was delighted, and will not be concerned about the inability of the battery to hold any charge whatsoever, or the fact that it's not only dog-slow, it's double-dog slow.

So once again I find myself shopping. I hate shopping. When shopping I am torn between the desire, on the one hand, to buy something and have done with it, and on the other hand with the desire to spend as little as possible, and on the third had with the desire to get the right product.

Having only two hands, and limited time and money, I have grown to loathe shopping.

But since I must do it, I have a few criteria that I need to balance in order to find my solution.

1) Weight. I'm currently looking at "ultraportables," because I'm tired of lugging around a ball-and-chain. Additionally I'm interested in...

2) Size. In a perfect world, my laptop would be small enough to fit in my pocket, and would, like something from The Jetsons, unfold into usability at the push of a button. Of course, whatever magic solutions may be out there, I at least need a usable...

3) Keyboard. I'm pretty flexible on keyboards, and can adapt to almost anything, but I need something big enough for 'real' typing, not two-thumbing. Chicklets, contact spots, those don't concern me so much, but I need to be able to type on it at full speed.

Those are the primary criteria. I want something that's the right size, with the right sized keyboard, but beyond that I'm pretty flexible. I've looked at a lot of things, including the Alphasmart, the DualCor cPc (which is apparently trying to copy the oQo right down to the logo), and various flavors of Sony Vaio. I'm not sure about the Vaio, though: when they advertise the computer using a tattoo on the small of some teenager's back, I suspect I'm not part of the marketing demographic for that product. And at 5.3 lbs, it is by no means 'light.'

I've even toyed with the idea of jumping over to a Mac Laptop, but there I'm torn. I love the architecture of the nifty Mac OS on top of the nifty Berkeley BSD-unix that takes me back to my days coding on NeXT and Amiga computers. On the other hand, now they have Mac laptops with Intel chips in them. I'm sorry, but there's only so much this old brain can handle - if I'm running MacOS on an Intel chip, and I use Wine to emulate Windows, I'm afraid that some kind of cosmic self-referential loop will be invoked and my laptop will twist in upon itself and vanish with a "pop."

And there's something just plain wrong about spending the extra money to invest in a Mac laptop simply because the company is too obstinate to simply sell Mac OS on a DVD and let one set up a triple-boot Mac/Linux/Windows system - the geek equivalent of dating triplets.

So as you can see, I'm all over the map. Right now my prime candidate is the Lenovo ThinkPad X41, mainly because being an IBM (Lenovo is some kind of mutant offspring of IBM and some other company, as is explained with all the breathless excitement of a family slideshow on their website) it is a very safe, boring, conventional solution. Pulling out the ThinkPad will require no explanations, and will inspire no fascinated questions from strangers. Gone are the days with my (still operational) NEC-PC8201a when I was on the cutting-edge of portable computing in my college classes.

Ah, the chicks really dug me with my 1970's full-face tinted glasses, my highwater slacks, and my pocket protector full of pens. When I pulled out my laptop and started typing, those girls knew they were looking at the future! Not their future in any dating sense of the word, but the future wherein their daughters would get tattoos of laptops on their butts. And you wondered why the national rate of childlessness is on the rise.

I dunno... maybe I'll bust it out of mothballs and start using that instead. The hard part will be finding an audio tape player from which to load the software!

While I'm trying to get my quarter-century-old laptop working again, tell me: what do you think I should buy?

Posted by Albatross at January 25, 2006 1:16 PM | TrackBack