On buying a laptop
O.K. this was supposed to be a blog of reviews, nightlife, all that in Honolulu. Well, it still is. But the great part about having a blog is that you are lord of your own little universe. I hereby choose to break the rules and so they are broken...ha!
Well, so far the only laptop I have owned is a very old Dell Inspiron 5000e provided by my UT advisor. The damn thing is practically an antique with a 5GB hard disk, PIII 800MHz processor, 192MB Ram and no WiFi. Getting it to do anything useful is like taking a brontosaurus on a hike. To make matters worse, it is an 8lb behemoth in the usual Dell tradition.
Nowadays Dell has some lighter and better looking laptops, but they still exude the stodgy corporate vibe which rules them out in my wishlist. Therefore, in my pursuit of sexiness I first decided on a Sony Vaio S580 with a 13.3 in widescreen display and ultra-sleek looks. Everything looked fine when it arrived except for a rattling battery and a WiFi switch that appeared to be stapled on. The x-brite screen just blew me away with it's bright colors...seriously no one makes screens like Sony. However, the joy was shortlived and in two days WinXP displayed a blue screen that said something terrible had happened to the registry and the laptop immediately shut itself down. After this it never booted up again, displaying the error "Hard drive not found". Hard drive not found?! I mean, what the fuck?? It's like you have no idea there's a brick stuffed up your ass! Needless to say I sent it back to Sony for a refund (btw guess who had to pay shipping?). Their customer support informed me the refund would take 8 weeks, but I was annoying enough and wouldn't go away, so it only took 3 weeks.
At this point I decided to switch 180 degrees and go for ultimate no-nonsense reliability i.e. the IBM Thinkpad (model # Z60t, widescreen). Well, I ordered and waited. And waited. After four weeks it still hadn't shipped. The sales reps at IBM/Lenovo said "we are having some problems maintaining inventory". But didn't the website say it was in stock? Apparently, in IBM corporate-speak that is the height of naivette. In-stock only means that there existed a point in time before the order when the item happened to be in-stock. Ahhhh...
I did some further snooping around on thinkpad forums and found some poor souls writing horror stories of a two month+ wait time. Being certain that another week on the Dell will drive me nuts, I cancelled the IBM and bought a Fujitsu S2110 for only $1049. It's already here in 3 days and so far the customer support has been fabulous. I was near tears when my sales rep actually returned my call in her sexy-next-door-girl voice. A 512MB USB flash drive came free too...
So far the laptop seems to be running fine. I have some issues with the build quality as there is lot of flex on the keyboard and some flex on the screen too. On the plus side, it weighs only 4lb with a battery life of 4 hrs - hence full marks on the portability side. It also runs on an AMD Turion MT-30 which pleases me in a perverse way. I'm not that much of the counter-culture type, but yeah, fuck that intel inside shit...heh...
posted by rahul @ 1:17 AM
5 Comments:
Seriously, I was waiting for you to say "... and then I decided to order an Apple". ;)
Your comments hit a nerve of truth. I would have bought a mac powerbook at this point if they weren't so damn expensive - the 12" one is $1499 and it's too small for me, 15" is $1999. If my fujitsu breaks apart I will spend the cash...until then I am sitting tight. Btw what's with steve jobs becoming ceo of disney? Sounds kinda surreal...
Hey, there... I found your blog because I, too, am currently lusting after the sexy Fujitsu Lifebook S2110 hehehe : ). I have not purchased it yet because I am saving up in order to do some major upgrading to the basic configuration. Thus, I will achieve the ultimate in sexiness : >...and hopefully there will also be some sort of price drop in the meantime.
Incidentally, I am currently in Houston, TX, and The Namesake, of all the books I have read recently ( well, actually, thinking back on it, that was over a year ago, but I guess the book made such an impression on me that it feels like yesterday), is one I absolutely could not put down. Off to read your review now.
islander: thanks for your comment. i'd recommend that you don't pour a lot of money into the S2110, it's allright but not great. buy the base config and see if you like it...newegg is already selling it for $1049. i don't think it will go much lower than that.
Well, I thought I'd need to do some upgrades since my last laptop got r e a l l y slow over time. A simple upgrade in memory did the trick and sped things up though. Sadly, about two weeks later, it crashed due to another problem. I just thought I'd do the upgrades as a means of prevention.
And yeah, I saw that New Egg had them for $1049, but I was a little nervous about purchasing from them due to their seven dead pixel policy in order for screen/computer replacement.
Sounds like New Egg did not disappoint, though, and your Fujitsu is working just fine and dandy : ). I am *so* beyond jealous... I even went to Mac's website to take a look at the MacBook Pro despite always having been a PC user. It's pretty impressive, but so far they aren't being made in the 12 inch version. I am all about the ultraportability : ).
Anyways, thanks for the info and take care.
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