The Aerie
I've got a new baby, thanks to everyone who didn't write with suggestions for what to buy.
My sure-to-be-controversial selection is...
The Sony Vaio TX650P. I actually bought it from the silver-painted toga-clad woman at left, just before she died by failing to leave a patch of skin unpainted. A pity, really, but at least the paint made her woozy enough that I could strike a good bargain.
Yes, I decided that I was willing to spend the extra money to have an almost-full-sized keyboard that I can slip into my jacket pocket. The TX650 weighs 2.8 lbs and is only 7.7 inches long, 10.7 inches wide, and 0.83 inches thick. Or to put it another way, if you have a 15" flat-panel monitor, my laptop is about the size of one half of your screen, and thinner, yet the keyboard is still 90% normal size.
I was looking at a couple of strong contenders. In second place was the Vaio VGN, which was slightly larger and heaver at 4.0 lbs. In third was the Averatech 4200, which is a full-sized laptop but was light and inexpensive. All of them included a built-in DVD burner, which considering the size and weight of the TX650 that I finally selected is truly mindboggling. Some laptops try to save weight and power by leaving the DVD player off and making it an external device. Problem with that approach is that if you're trying to save on weight, a separate DVD drive requires that you tote around both its additional weight as well as a bag in which to carry it.
I liked the fact that the screen, while smaller than others at 11.1 inches (diagonal measure) is 1360X768, as compared to 1280X768 for the next largest. That means that while the icons and stuff are small, the actual real-estate on which I can place icons and documents is rather larger than the others. While my eyes are still young enough to handle it, I may as well indulge.
A couple things I don't like about it: first, it comes with a nifty little antenna allowing one to use cell-phone networks in order to get on the Internet. The only way I will ever use this is if I can figure out a way to completely replace my cell phone with this device - and I suppose I can look into this option. Otherwise I have this rubbery little antenna on the right side of the computer, and a bunch of software and icons, which I had to pay for and will not ever use.
And my second complaint, speaking of software and icons... what a botch! Turning this device on, I find myself in Windows XP Pro (some of the other possible laptops only came with XP Home), just stuffed full of crap: an AOL setup package with ain icon lurking in the quick-launch bar, a Netscape setup package, a two-month "trial" verision of Office Small Business, some lame spyware remover, and worst of all, a two month trial version of Norton Security.
Anyone who's ever tried knows that upgrading or uininstalling Norton is like conducting brain surgery. So putting it on the system by default strikes me as reckless and abusive. If I don't want it, I have to spend an evening elbows-deep in the registry, lobotomizing my computer. One colleague at work advised that I back up the drive, wipe it, and start over. I don't think I should need to do that, but it may come down to it - I'm not even 100% sure I don't want to dual-install linux and Windows.
But these are quibbles - I sat last night at a friend's house, boosting an internet connection from her neighbors (on the one side a fraternity, on the other, a halfway house for gay alcoholics: it's like she lives amidst a before-and-after picture), setting up Cygwin with Open SSH in order to do remote X sessions to my home system. After about two hours of disk-intensive wireless Internet, the power was not down below 66%.
This afternoon at lunch I stopped by the local Starbux to see about getting online and working remotely - only to learn that Starbucks has sold its soul to T-Mobile. Despite the fact that I have a T-Mobile cell phone with voice and Internet service, I couldn't get T-Mobile to let me on their Hotspot. Greedy bums.
So I cleaned up icons (swept into a folder labelled "crap") and uninstalled AOL and Earthlink and a bunch of other junk. Tonight I have a roleplaying appointment at Professor Barker's, but this weekend hopefully I can resume work on my novels...
I'm so happy with my new purchase, even this doesn't bother me. (Besides, even if it were released today as advertised, it would be two years until any sensible person bought one while the kinks were worked out of it.)
Posted by Albatross at February 2, 2006 3:19 PM | TrackBack