Laptops

Lately, my laptop has been showing signs of aging. A few weeks ago, one of its hinges–that had been on the fritz for a while–finally broke, so now I have to handle the darn thing extra super delicately, or else the monitor will collapse. One of the hinges on the battery broke a while back as well, causing it to stick out a bit of what should otherwise be a flush back. The “E” on my keyboard is also on its last legs. Hard to believe, but it’s now over 4 years old which, as we all know, means it’s basically a dinosaur compared to today’s laptops.

Should I get a new laptop?

There’s a lot to choose from these days. Not just by way of manufacturer, but also by type of laptop. Those new netbooks seem kind of cool. Great battery life too. But the screens are so small. And they seem kind of dainty. I guess if I had to go with a laptop at this very moment, it’d probably be Dell’s new Latitude E4300. I know, I’m kind of Dell crazy these days (see this post and this post), but the E4300 has close to everything I like in a laptop; thin and light, built-in optical drive, reasonably sized screen size, good battery life, cool look, etc. But, as expected, it’s a bit pricey. For a while, I was transfixed by Dell’s XPS M1330, but if you select the special slim and light LCD (which is basically what qualifies this laptop as a thin and light) the price starts to sky rocket. Plus, I sort of prefer the professional look of the E4300. The Lenovo Thinkpad X300 has some appeal, but that’s also way too expensive, and you’re forced to use a solid state drive. I don’t have anything against SSDs, but you can only choose from one size (64GB) — you should at least have the option to choose a regular hard drive.

So, probably no final decisions on the horizon. I’ll likely just end up thinking about this for a while longer and then filing it in the back burner where it will sit until prices start to drop… or my laptop finally kicks the bucket, whichever comes first!

By the way, I just have to say, I’m glad Fall has finally arrived. It feels great.